CLAYTON COTTERELL
'Arrangements’

Ampersand, Portland
25.09.2013 - 24.10.2013 

Ampersand is pleased to present Arrangements, an exhibition of photographs by Portland artist Clayton Cotterell. This new body of work marks a departure from his previous exhibition & publication with the gallery, Unarmed, which quietly chronicled his brother’s transition from boyhood to manhood as a mechanic/private who served in Afghanistan. Cotterell’s new approach revels in the spontaneity of the photographic medium, allowing for succinct encounters with light, color & form to guide both the content & open-ended, sensuous meaning of the work. Seeking out naturally occurring abstractions, the photographs Cotterell has made are global in reach, yet are not about any particular place. The simplicity of their titles attests to the easily recognizable parameters of their content: this is a pole, here is a telephone cord, look at this towel. Such transparency invites one to dwell not on a photograph’s meaning, but instead on the organized complexity of the photograph itself, whereby an image that dazzles from a distant first encounter becomes endlessly richer the closer one scrutinizes its surface. The resulting sense of malleability that occurs with such viewing is heightened by the relational proximity of one photograph to another. In this, Arrangements allows for continual shifts in its own framework while deliberately referencing the continual evolution of photographic language at large.

© Ampersand | Clayton Cotterell

POINTS ON THE MAP
The Representation of Conflict in Cultural Space

CAFAM Art Museum, Beijing China
25.10.2013 - 08.12.2013 

Group Exhbition featuring: Robert Knoth & Antoinette de Jong, Poppy - Trails of Afghan Heroin (4 screen video installation); Tim Hetherington, Sleeping Soldiers (3 screen video installation); Simon Burke, Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afganistan (prints); Ad Nuis, Oil and Paradise (2 screen video installation); Anastasia Khoroshilova, Out of Context (prints); Seda Muradyan, From Home to Home (documentary video); Dirk-Jan Visser & Arthur Huizinga, Offside - Football in Exile (prints, video); Ad van Denderen, Building for the Future: Baladia / Rawabi (prints); Nir Evron, Oriental Arch (video); Juul Hondius, Brilliant Punitive Raids (video, prints); Miquel Dewever-Playa & Isabele Fougere, Alma: A Tale of Violence (iPad app); Kadir van Lohuizen, Via PanAm (iPad app)

Points on the Map – The Representation of Conflict in Cultural Space deals with the changing geopolitical landscape in the 21st century and the ways in which political conflicts are being represented by photographers, filmmakers and artists. It is a multiplatform exhibition, including photographic prints, audiovisual installations and apps. 

Looking outwards, into the world, has been a characteristic of western societies and the photographers and filmmakers that were part of it. Chinese foreign politics however, can be characterized by an attitude of non-interference. This situation is expected not to exist much longer: Chinese investments in other parts of the world are getting too big to be neglected when instability of whatever nature threatens the continuity of the economic interests. This will mark the inevitable start of making dirty hands abroad for the new super power, just as the west has done for centuries. It implies a major geopolitical landslide for the world as a whole.  The aim of Points on the Map is to show what kind of models and practices documentary photographers and filmmakers have developed in recent years regarding conflicts in other (and in some cases their own) parts of the world. In this framework four regions will receive special attention: Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Latin-America and the Caucasus.

But the projects that are part of Points on the Map have also been chosen for other reasons. They are examples of a documentary practice that is geared at alternative platforms, including independent, cultural environments and no longer at mass media, which have lost their appeal. Remarkable is the mix of still and moving images, text and sound as well as the chosen platforms: Internet, iPad or installations, all of which allow multimedia.

The Beijing Photo Biennial will take place from October 24 until December 8, 2013 at the Beijing World Art Museum / China Millennium Monument.

©  Beijing Photo Biennial | CAFAM Art Museum

FERGUS JORDAN
Garden Estate

Garden Estate is a new series of work examining the legacy of Northern Ireland’s first heroin epidemic, which devastated a 1970’s council estate on the edge of Ballymena called Dunclug. The work reflects on the impact of more than a decade of social dysfunction, in which authorities failed to control the influx of hard drugs to the street. By opening our eyes to the dark corners of this neighbourhood and its residual landscapes, this series reveals the tensions and social complexities of a broken community on the periphery.

Fergus Jordan (b.1982) is an Irish artist based in Belfast. He completed a PhD in Photography at the Research Centre of Art, Design and the Built Environment at the University of Ulster (2012). His photography investigates the conflict between the darkness, the night, the invisible and the study of post-conflict societies. 

The Velvet Cell is an independent publisher of small-run photography books, formed in London in 2011. We are committed to making books that are both intellectually challenging and beautiful. We are about photography that tells stories, asks questions and encourages dialogue. Each book is a monograph, a solo show for the artist. We typically publish books in limited edition runs of 300-500.

32 pages,
240 x 300 mm,
ISBN 978-1-908889-18-8,
Limited Edition of 750
Oct 2013

© The Velvet Cell 

WHAT’S NEW/UK PHOTOGRAPHY#2
RizHoma.gallery, Milan, Italy

RizHoma.gallery presents WHAT’S NEW/UK PHOTOGRAPHY#2 the second and last step of a show which investigates the latest tendencies in documentary photography in UK. This episode offers an overview of the current documentary practice in the south Wales ‘Valleys’ region, featuring works by Welsh photographers Gawain Barnard, David Barnes, Paul Cabuts and Jack Latham.

From the 6th to the 27th November 2013 RizHoma.gallery is hosting the second and last step of WHAT’S NEW/UK PHOTOGRAPHY, a show, curated by Marina Colajanni, which aims to perform an investigation of young UK photography, focusing on the rewardable documentary tradition as it has matured since the very early years.

While the first episode of the show has been a chance to present works by some of youngest photographers who have graduated from the Documentary Photography course at the University of South Wales, Newport. WHAT’S NEW/UK PHOTOGRAPHY#2 offers instead an overview of current documentary practice in the south Wales ‘Valleys’ region- the environment in which the famous university was born and continues to develop its education and research programme.

The second step features works by the Welsh photographers Gawain Barnard, David Barnes, Paul Cabuts and Jack Latham, alumni and researchers from the University who are presenting a remarkable insight into the culture of the region through diverse responses. Gawain Barnard’s series ‘Maybe We’ll be Soldiers’ is a story of realization, self-doubt, expectations and coming of age told through a seductive mix of portraiture and detail in the landscape. David Barnes’ long-term, partly autobiographical, ‘King Tide’ blends fact and fiction by the weaving of complex fragments of family and community life, while Paul Cabuts’ series, ‘Poles’, looks at both the structure and locations of tele-communications poles in the south Wales valleys in reference to their contemporary and historical social and cultural meaning. Finally, Jack Latham looks at the possibilities of community and memory in Wales in a personal journey through a small site of family history in flux.  

Birgit Jürgenssen
‘Works from the 1970s’

Alison Jacques Gallery, London
15.10.2013 - 16.11.2013

"I wanted to show the common prejudices against women, the role models that society ascribed to them, the ones with which I was always confronted - and I wanted to depict everyday misunderstandings."

Birgit Jürgenssen, 2003

Alison Jacques Gallery presents the first UK solo show of Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen (1949 - 2003). This exhibition has been realised in close collaboration with the Birgit Jürgenssen Estate and Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna and focuses on one decade of the artist’s life: 1970 - 1980.

An eloquent but radical counter to the male-dominated Viennese Actionism movement, Jürgenssen’s diverse body of work stretched across performance, photography, drawing and sculpture and was heavily autobiographical while simultaneously universal. She powerfully subverted the social stereotyping, fetishism and forced domestication of women and it’s only now that her work is being rediscovered and acknowledged for its importance. Recent international museum acquisitions include MoMA, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The main work in this show is the largest and most complex piece Jürgenssen ever made: an installation titled 10 Days - 100 Photos (1980). As its title suggests, it’s composed of 100 of her performative Polaroids and photographs taken over a 10-day period, arranged asymmetrically through intersecting lines of narrative. What’s immediately evident is that, although all the images are self-portraits, Jürgenssen’s face is either not included or hidden by a mask behind fur. According to her, ‘the identity of the woman has been made to disappear - all except for the fetishized object, which is the focus of male fantasy’.

Another piece that’s both central to this exhibition and Jürgenssen’s practice is Amazon (1974), in which a mother and child stand holding hands like latter-day holy figures on a tall iron chair. The mother’s stature as a strident contemporary Amazon is emphasized by her sheath of arrows, her daughter looking up to her in expectation and a colour photograph of a fragile male ‘Ophelia’ drowning in water and leaves on the chair behind them. By portraying her as the hero, and him as vulnerable, Jürgenssen poetically inverted mid-’70s societal norms.

Among Jürgenssen’s most iconic works are her shoe series, made in the ’70s and manifested in sculpture and drawings. She made less than 18 sculptures, each created from different materials including porcelain and wax, and less durable media such as rust and bread. In this show, Relict Shoe (1976), made from an animal’s jaw bone and presented on a silk cushion, is shown alongside Flyweight Shoes (1973), two paper thin organza boots with what appear to be perfectly preserved dead flies sewn into the fabric. The shoe drawings, shown alongside the sculptures, reveal a playful but dark humour in her work. This power of humour in Jürgenssen’s armoury is also present throughout many other drawings in the exhibition, most notably in a study of three pubis shaped rocks entitled Beauty Competition (1978), and a drawing of Marlene Dietrich not only smoking in bed while she holds her iconic pose, but keeping her eye-lash curlers on.

Many of the photographs in the show relate to performances such as Kitchen Apron (1974-75) and Nest (1979). Some lesser-known performative photographs such as Nun (1979) have been hand-coloured by the artist. A black-masked, shrouded Jürgenssen lies prostrate in a theatrical setting in this diptych, which she has then painted in gold, bringing another layer of performance to her process.

©  Alison Jacques Gallery 

HENRI VAN NOORDENBURG
'Efface'

Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne
06.11.2013 - 23.11.2013 

Edmund Pearce Gallery is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Henri van Noordenburg. Efface sees the artist featured as a protagonist within the environment, facing the threats of a seemingly hostile land. The exhibition overlays and references van Noordenburg’s own European sensibilities, which are seemingly at odds with the Australian landscape.

Starting with self portraits set amid a featureless black background, and drawing inspiration from Dutch and Australian masters, the photographic surface is meticulously hand etched. Van Noordenburg describes the process as an “incredible mix between strength and weakness, frustration and containment, euphoria and adrenaline”.

Feelings, which mirror van Noordenburg’s own attempts to assimilate within a new and dominant culture. Henri van Noordenburg graduated from Queensland University of Technology in 2004, with a MA in Visual Arts and Theatre. He has had numerous exhibitions including group shows and publications in Australia, Europe and Asia, solo shows within Australia and a touring exhibition around Eastern Europe. His work is included in various national and international private and public collections and has undertaken an art residency in Estonia and received various awards.

© Edmund Pearce Gallery | Henri van Noordenburg

SIMON ROBERTS
‘Pierdom’

Robert Morat Gallery, Hamburg
01.11.2013 - 11.01.2014

As in previous work, notably “Motherland” (2007) and “We English” (2009), British photographer Simon Roberts examines cultural-historical questions of national identity and the attachment of people to their land through his large format landscape photographs. “Perhaps the most promising British image maker in years”, as German Photo Magazine called him in 2010, traveled across England over the last years, visiting coastal towns and producing a series of photographs of the pleasure piers built since Victorian times.

Originally planned as landing strips for steam boats, the piers soon became destinations themselves with cafes and souvenir shops, symbols of the longing for leisure, fresh air and holiday fun. And as always, the longing places tell much about the reality in the time of industrialization in the mid -19th Century.

Simon Roberts born 1974, studied Human Geography and Photography in Sheffield. He gained international reputation with the publication of his books “Motherland” (2007) and “We English” (2009). His work has been awarded and exhibited internationally, among others at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai and at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England. His work is found in important collections such as the Deutsche Börse Art Collection, the George Eastman House and the Wilson Centre for Photography. Simon Roberts lives and works in Brighton.

© Simon Roberts | Robert Morat Gallery

BY STEVE BISSON

I recently received the self published zine TRÁNSITO by Spanish photographer, designer and blogger  Andrés Medina. I like to get these limited editions, numbered and signed by hand. They retain a human taste, which reminds me of old letters. 

In the case of Andrés, with whom I exchange messages -  for some years now, without ever having seen each other -  this gesture has a special meaning. I have been following with interest his visual research for a while and recently his long-term project “Río”. A work of great interest. The reasons are all in the words of Andrés: 

«“Río” started from the need to photograph the unconnected, strange and secluded places that are the surroundings of a river nearby Madrid, a big city. An intimate search having the landscape as a mirror of the human traces within a (suposedly) untouched environment.»

His new edition, available form here, appears to bind to this research, yet it goes further. In this sense it is a valuable document to appreciate an evolution in the perception of his own work, and the desire to experiment.

All this is also an invitation to reflect on the large debate on the production of photobooks. It is true: in recent years we have seen a huge proliferation of independent productions sometimes of poor quality, with horrible graphics, and miserably printed. 

However, I believe that this movement is healthy. Dealing with a book from A to Z is a critical exercise for any photographer. It helps to develop critical skills, to view images in a different way, and to integrate other languages. The book can be read as a meta project. Therefore I find this new editorial wave to be positive, and rich of stories, signs, possible landscapes. Somehow it is a snapshot of the contemporary.

© Andrés Medina

MELAIE JAYNE TAYLOR
A way with all 

beam contemporary, Melbourne
16.11.2013 - 14.12.2013 

A way with it all is an exhibition of new work by Melanie Jayne Taylor that reflects her engagement with the archive as an institution, a place, and a process or series of processes. The potentially infinite nature of the Modern archive, and the physical weight of her ever growing body of material, creates a situation where the organisation and management of Taylor’s personal archive forms the subject of her art practice. In this way, each exhibition presents a new arrangement of the broader archive.

Taylor suggests that, in order to allow for the influx of new material into the archive, one must physically and mentally clear space within the archive. We have to experience the process of ‘letting go’ in order to move on and make way for the new.

In her new video works, the artist performs the physical act of letting go of past images from her archive. In Away with it All [By Dusk], Taylor stands on the water’s edge at sunset and attempts to push an archive box full of photographic content into the sea. This poetic gesture appears at first to be futile, as the box floats out momentarily, before being pushed back to the shoreline, but as the salt water starts to physically interact with the photographs the images are irrevocably changed, physically and metaphorically.

As a counter to the very personal expulsion of images presented in the video works, Taylor has invited cataloguers at the State Library of Victoria to review and catalogue a selection of her photographic archive, which will determine how the works are compiled and disseminated within the space of the gallery. This gesture suggests an oscillation between the subjective and objective that forms the selection process of any archive, further examining the action of ‘letting go’ and how this can stimulate the archive.

© beam contemporary | Melanie Jayne Taylor 

SHEN CHAO-LIANG
Stage

The Salt Yard, Hong Kong
23.11.2013 - 12.01.2014 

The Salt Yard, an independent art space, will exhibit “STAGE” by veteran Taiwanese photographer Shen Chao-liang from November 23, 2013 to January 12, 2014. Travelled around Taiwan between 2006 and 2012, Shen pictured mobile stage trucks used by performing groups in the form of cabaret, song and dance ensemble as well as recreational band.

Cabaret is a unique mobile performing group in Taiwan that it has been active in various occasions, including weddings and funerals since the 1970s. In the early days, dancing and singing were the main performances but new elements have been introduced in order to attract more audience. In addition to celebrities and singers putting on exhilarating shows, pole dancing, acrobatics, magic, folk arts, large-scale music shows, or even man strip shows and drag shows, are also performed. The stage also evolves over time. The thirst for quality audio visual effects from business owners and audience lead to the development of foldable hydraulic trucks. The content and styles of the East and the West begin to merge as well.  Sailboats, dragons, pavilions, butterflies, horses, Sydney Opera House, the White House, European-style castles, the Statue of Liberty, space shuttles, Ferris wheel and even kiddy figures like Hello Kitty and Pikachu are entering the stage as spray-painted backdrop with the help of neon lights and new luminous LED lights.  

These stage trucks have become the collective memory of the Taiwanese and the distinctive culture of Taiwan’s plebeian society. Using view cameras, Shen delicately portrayed these dazzling images that were mostly a no-man’s landscape incorporating the surrounding environment. Contrast of illusion and reality, silence and uproar, motion and stillness, moderns and traditions were highlighted to inspire the audience about the cultural value of this Taiwanese entertainment industry.

© The Salt Yard |  Shen Chao-liang 

CLOSED FOR WINTER
Isidro Ramírez

The edition ‘Closed for Winter ’ by Isidro Ramírez is an elegant booklet, with a restful aspect and a discreet size. A turquoise cover recalls the color mix of sea and the sky much like the images of the Spanish photographer.

The Velvet Cell has chosen a light and thin appearance for the occasion, yet pleasing to the touch and inviting to be uncovered. The paper is nice, with a fine patina that holds the nuances of colors.

There are few images all taken in coastal resorts. The eye seems to claim a vanishing point, almost annoyed by what stands in the foreground. It is in this contrast, rather than a dialogue, between the built and the surrounding waters that propels the investigation of the author.

As well stated from the title, there is also a silence dictated by the sense of emptiness left by the summer visitors. All gone once again. As in an endless cycle. Yet all of this creates a pause for reflection on the function of architectural design and on the ambiguities that it can generate. These vacant spaces, as the author wrote at the end of the booklet, are a chance to become ourselves architects, and to fill these gaps with imagination.

These places, different from each other are connected by the intention to provoke the contradictory nature of the landscape, which appears to me as a central topic in the visual search of Isidro Ramírez.»
[- Steve Bisson] 

Closed for Winter
Isidro Ramírez
16 pp / 152 x 177 mm
Saddle-Stitch, Colour Offset
ISBN 978-1-908889-17-1
Limited Edition of 300

More info HERE

© The Velvet Cell | Isidro Ramírez