‘They are sticky, maybe you can say magnetic’: Michelle Atherton and TC McCormack open exhibition in Linz – 28 June 2018
THEY ARE STICKY, MAYBE YOU CAN SAY MAGNETIC
über Sammlungen und andere Verbindungen in der Dichotomie der Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft
Jette Gejl, Michelle Atherton & TC McCormack
Thursday June 28 2018, 7.30PM
KunstRaum Goethestrasse xtd, Linz, Austria
Exhibition on between 29 June – 31 July 2018
LIVE AT KUNSTRAUM: 12PM, 29 June – a thirteen-hour programme with invited speakers, artists and screenings.
We live in unstable times; the social order shows its disorder, the traditional categories of knowledge and concepts of history are no longer liable. In search of new beginnings, we looked to the promise of new models of union, social arrangements that appeal to our ideals, aspirations, and worldviews.
This exhibition is conceived as an excavation site, a staging to revalue public and private collections in whatever form – whether animal, mineral, technological, mythological or not.
Jette Gejl (DK) will present an exploration that maps the entirety of the colour beige and furthers it on site. The methods include various elements such as testimonial, text and material analysis as well as a cooking school and performative talks.Through the search for Ultimate Beige Gejl seeks, through democratic processes, a more refined and original nuance of beige than the international definition: RAL 1001 (RAL is a the most famous and widely used European color matching system that defines colors for paint, coatings and plastics).
Michelle Atherton (GB) swivels attention towards the irrational, exploring those actions, thinking and behaviours that could appear more illogical in comparison to other more rational alternatives. In RIGs, the Repository of Irrational Gestures in Power Point form, she brings together a sequence of irrational gestures from myths, insect noises, film stills, neo-feudal structures, Avant Garde references, occult motion, song lyrics and more global outpourings. This irrational inventory is a collective endeavour including contributors from artists, academics and an entomologist. So begins the irrational collection. With thanks to Jessica Harrington, Wendy Leeks and Lucy Lound.
TC McCormack (GB) considers how our man-made structures exist in and out of time, and how the course of history continually reappraises our concept of value and indeed collections. In his time-based installation sequential phrasing enables different scenes to move between and across a screen based assemblage and a large projection, which in turn sets up a dialogue with a large print and an accompanying text piece. These works offer unfolding acts of dislocation, in resisting any temporal trajectory, they appear to move in and out of time.
Michelle Atherton is Senior Lecturer in Sheffield Institute of Arts (SIA) and a member of the Art & Design Research Centre (ADRC) within C3RI. Michelle’s research explores the resistance of space through the encounter with the image, often using cultural phenomena as a starting point to discuss structures and systems. Michelle’s work has been widely exhibited in a range of galleries and art museums across Europe.
TC McCormack is also Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Institute of Arts (SIA) and in C3RI’s Art & Design Research Centre (ADRC). TC’s practice-led research takes a multi-disciplinary approach using video, photography, collage, text and curatorial practice. His research incorporates subjects as diverse as the contradictions of modernist heritage; aesthetics of cultural memory and the possibility of language to delineate the relational affinities of forms.
1. In 1887 the sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies identified two distinct forms of opposing social organisations, Gemeinschaft (more modern, atomised, individualistic) and Gesellschaft (of lost innocence, organic, mutual). These historical frames are a fated transition and a generative measure.