Rogue Studios Exhibition KRAAK

Private View: 29th February 6pm until late.

Open Day: Thursday 1st March 12-3pm.

Title: Cloakroom

Taneesha Ahmed is a curator and artist, currently doing an MA Curating at Chelsea School of Art and Design. Her practice intersects between both the fields of curating and art, where she has tried to develop and interdisciplinary approach. She is particularly interested in how the constructs of space and place operate, paying attention to context specificity. Her research interests are in self-reflexivity, institutional critique and relational aesthetics. She also works collaboratively with Annie Carpenter, as the collective Ahmed & Carpenter. The outcomes of her practice are performative often realised as interventions, interactive games moving image works, drawings and sculpture.

For the exhibition she will carry out a series of small performative interventions in the space drawing reference from its context of being a gig venue and place of interaction. Cloakroom will be an exploration into how people interact with each other and in a space when they are initiated into it. This experiment requires an element of trust from the spectators, and investigates how this is developed through modes of exchange.

Matthew Bamber

Title: Window

This installation screens a recording of a window from within Rogue Studios looking out towards a view of Matthew’s exterior studio window. The only indication of movement comes from the slight changes in weather conditions and passing birds. Window is a new photographic video installation specifically produced for the exhibition at Kraak.

Matthew’s practice involves the collection of data from experimental projects and spaces.

Annie Carpenter

Titel: Trying to Hit the Video Camera with a Ping Pong Ball, Film projection

Annie Carpenter’s work often references the act of making art itself. She is interested in working processes and the experimentation involved in ‘trying’ to do something. Trying to Hit the Video Camera with a Ping Pong Ball, is the latest in a series of ‘Trying to’ pieces, it illustrates the frustrating nature of making video works, and how a simple act (which is easy enough when you don’t want to do it), becomes a recurring annoyance.

Mike Chavez-Dawson

Title: ‘Inter-Texual-Ventions Part 5, Reconfigured Documentation Mimed with Responsive Sound Track’s 2012.’

This ‘Inter-Textual-Vention’ will function as an ‘informative performative’ lecture that will sit between the traditional & chronological and the absurd & improvised, it’s intention is to act as a live critical text for the overall exhibition.

“I intend to document and respond to the other artists work in the show, I’ll digitally document the works where possible and assemble a Power Point Presentation on site, I will dictate my thoughts and interpretations on the works and any linking factors using the iPhone app ‘Dragon Dictation’ it is year of the Water Dragon after all…”

Dragon Dictation is notorious for its misinterpretations, all the typos and inconsistencies that the software creates will be kept, though a printed version of the text will be mounted on the wall – with corrections in red biro, a live performance will see Chavez-Dawson mime to a pre-recorded reading of the uncorrected script whilst he flick’s through the shambolic power point presentation.

The lecture performance will also be inter-spliced with audio performances by a series of invited artists & musician’s and a conclusive ‘Live-Paragraphic Text’ piece will be performed by him.

Mike Chavez-Dawson is an Interdisciplinary Artist Curator based at Rogue Artists Studios his work fluctuates between curation and performance. He’s currently a PhD research fellow at MIRIAD, and has show and performed at TATE Britain, Barbican, ICA, Cornerhouse, The Whitworth Art Gallery, British Art Show 7 at Nottingham Contemporary and The Whitstable Biennale.

Matthew Denniss

The Utopian buck stops here

TV monitor, DVD, 4 min 25 sec

This is a video using found YouTube footage of Brasilia, the capital city of Brasil. Built from the ground up between 1956 and 1960 on a site which was previously dense jungle, Brasilia is a fantasy city, a Corbusian Utopia made real. The narration makes reference to architecture and movement around an imaginary landscape. It draws accidental parallels with the video footage. In this video, I am trying to bring together my interests in landscape, writing and chance.

Denniss’ practice is concerned with natural phenomena, the landscape and the body, exploring ideas through sculpture, installation, performance, text, sound and video. Denniss is interested in artifice and ways of understanding nature and the landscape thorough machines, experiments and installations. He looks at and appropriate pseudo science, un-proven scientific theories and forgotten technologies in his work. There is a concern with uncertainty, unanswered questions and indecipherable information.

Jessica Longmore

Jessica Longmore’s practice involves a series of appropriate gestures; instinctive sculptural responses to the psychology of particular spaces. Her work draws on both her own and the viewer’s haptic senses to relentlessly question the forces which ground us and orientate us within a space.

Jessica often applies a rigid framework to her studio practice, imposing strict time limits or placing herself within tense, highly charged environments. Her recent focus has surrounded the idea of the studio being a former in the production of work; which has led her to spend single days creating work in other artists’ studios, using only the objects she encounters there.

Rebecca Rogers

Rebecca’s current research is focused on is multi spatial environments and the portals of transition from one environment to the other she is fascinated with exploring the creation of replicas and the multiple.

Mould making is at the heart of her practice using doors as her foundation. “Is the repetition what makes the work become work, or is the multiples that enable the work to be a whole again and no longer a replica?” is something that she is questioning throughout out her current practice.

She is heavily influenced by Folkert De Jong who suggests “the clones are trading with themselves, their own kind, ripping off each other and dancing towards their destiny; self destruction.”

Rebecca is currently studying for an MA in Contemporary Fine Arts at Salford University her practice involves cast, sculpt and print.

Mary Stark

Title – That’s Entertainment (Clear film leader, splicing tape, unspooled super 8mm projector and super 8mm feature film ‘That’s Entertainment’ MGM, released 1974, 135 minutes)

Mary Stark is developing work weaving tapestries from abandoned or unwanted celluloid. Her practice examines changing technology and culture, the materiality of celluloid film and its future in a ‘digital age’. She is interested in the physical processes of cutting and projecting film, ideas that emerge from interdisciplinary dialogue, and the expanded fields of photography and cinema.

Stark bought the feature film ‘That’s Entertainment’, released in 1974 by MGM, as 6 reels of film sold as mixed parts on eBay. The tapestry is woven with each thread representing individual scenes, during construction she realised there was a significant amount missing and used clear leader with text to represent the missing sections. The vertical warp is the first half of the film, and the horizontal weft is the second.

The film is comprised of clips from MGM musicals, from the 1920s to the 1950s. Over a hundred scenes are linked by some of the stars, such as Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, handing the commentary onto one another.

www.searchingforcelluloid.wordpress.com documents the making of this work, as well as visits to archives, cinemas, film labs and exhibitions. This is a project funded by a Cornerhouse Micro Commission, supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Jenny Steele

If you’re lost, remember what you saw on the way is a stop frame animation projected within the architecture of the Kraak space. The animation is constructed from drawings of both abstract and recognisable architectural forms from the streets of central Manchester.

Jenny Steele’s multidisciplinary practice explores ideas of navigation in physical and digital space, in particular focusing on our experience of their architectural structures. Jenny Steele is currently Artist in Residence at Manchester School of Art, and is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Blackburn University Centre (University of Lancaster).

KRAAK is supported by Grants for the Arts, Arts Council England. This exhibition is part of the SAM Series of experimental music and visual exhibitions and commissions hosted at KRAAK.

KRAAK, The Alleyway, 11 Stevenson Square, Manchester M1 1BD