CCA Art Events

Exhibition: (SAC) Ongoing bodies: Syndrome de Paris Suite

02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Working collaboratively, artists Simone Hutchinson, Alex Kennedy and Conal McStravick will develop a moving image and sound installation derived from a co-authored text. (SAC) Ongoing bodies: Syndrome de Paris Suite re-contextualises a series of performances filmed at CCA and Glasgow School of Art, in 2010.

The installation explores ideas of Orientalism (specifically Japonisme), referencing Japanese Kabuki opera, The Heron Maiden; where the male actor in a female role (onnagata) symbolises the problem of embodying the other sex. Other references include Samuel Beckett’s Quad and the body performances of artist Dan Graham.

Presented on a series of domestic and gallery monitors, the installation uses the viewer’s movements within the space to trigger sensors that regulate and ‘edit’ the situation and experience of the work.

About Simone Hutchinson, Alex Kennedy and Conal McStravick
Simone Hutchinson (born Middlesborough) is currently researching a PhD in English Literature, investigating the politics and aesthetics of work and labour in fiction, at the University of Glasgow.

Alexander Kennedy (born Stirling) currently manages a small Glasgow-based publishing press, Daat Press. He has worked for a number of years as a critic and art historian at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh College of Art.

Conal McStravick (born Lurgan) is an artist based in London who works with moving image, text and installation. Graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2005, he served on the Transmission Gallery Committee until 2009 and participated in LUX Associate Artists Programme 2011.

Exhibition: Polis

04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In the exhibition Polis, Glasgow-based artist, Helen de Main presents a new body of work in printmaking and sculpture. The works appear as fragments and remnants of objects, building encounters between real or fictive events that have either just happened or are about to take place. These images and texts continue de Main’s concern with questioning power, movement and control through a series of dysfunctional calls to action.

Exhibition: Underside, backside, inside, even

16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Laura Aldridge’s work moves freely between wall-based reliefs and sculptural installations, playing on the abilities of ‘collage’ to operate in two and three-dimensions. Her works use fabric, images (both photographic and silk-screened) and found objects to create installations that the artist describes as ‘expanded collage’. She often arranges elements of her works upon tables, low plinths or across gallery walls to bring ‘things’ together so that they might coalesce as a whole.

Underside, backside, inside, even is a series of new fabric sculptures, depicting oversized fabric pockets found on a variety of clothing, from pinafore dresses to the back pockets of jeans. Rendered and hand-stitched in great detail, larger than human scale and cut-out from their original context, these pockets become ‘things’, emphasising their potential to hold other objects or even the body. The sensory elements of Aldridge’s installations are important in setting up a relationship between ‘bodies’ to ‘objects’.

About Laura Aldridge
Laura Aldridge (born Frimley, England, 1978) graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art in 2006, spending an exchange at CALARTS, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include: Cairn, Pittenweem, Fife, 2011; Studio Voltaire, London, 2011 and Cats are not important at Transmission Gallery, 2011. Laura is also part of the Glasgow-based Poster Club.

Aldridge’s exhibition at CCA has been generously supported by The Elephant Trust.

Exhibition: Thinking Ourselves into Existence

16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Psykick Dancehall is Hannah Ellul and Ben Knight. They will use the Vanguard space to continue their ongoing discussions with musician, musicologist and founder of Sheffield-based record label Singing Knives, Jon Marshall. What are the politics of experimental music and how can they be explored through interdisciplinary means? What new forms of collaboration might this provoke?

Throughout February Psykick Dancehall will host a resource room and a listening space with an archive of recordings, as well as hosting discussions, talks and performances.

Talk: Laure Prouvost: The Wanderer

23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Laure Prouvost presents a discussion on her new film The Wanderer as a trailer to the seven-part project commissioned by FLAMIN and Book Works. The film is a fictional story in which a character undergoes a series of increasingly bizarre and mysterious experiences. As he tries to hold onto reality, it seems to melt from under him.

The Wanderer has been developed from a work by artist Rory Macbeth, who translated a Kafka novella from German into English without any knowledge of the German language or a dictionary, over a period of two years. Mixing everyday footage with staged interludes, the plot will constantly be undermined by disparate audio/visual elements and misunderstandings.

About Laure Prouvoust and Rory Macbeth
Laure Prouvost was born in 1978 in Croix-Lille, France, and lives and works in London. She graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Arts in 2002. In 2009 she completed the LUX Artist Associate Programme. Recent solo exhibitions include; Frieze Projects, 2011; Before Before at MOT International, London, 2011 and Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain, London, 2010. She was the winner of the Principle Prize at the 2011 Oberhausen Short Film Festival. In November 2011, Prouvost won the Max Mara art prize for women.

Rory Macbeth (1965) lives and works in Leeds and London. He received a BA in Fine Art from Central St. Martin's in 2000 and has performed and exhibited extensively throughout Europe. Macbeth is also the founder and co-director of PILOT, the only large-scale international forum and archive of artists who are not represented by galleries.