Events
Shorts For Winter
01 March 2015 | 2-5pm
Tickets are free but must be booked here
A warm welcome will be served along with free hearty food to share.
Bring a bottle and some appreciation for those involved (donations for artists accepted and encouraged).
PLEASE NOTE spaces are limited. Book early to secure your place.
Our Guests:
Stephan Barrett
Having charted a course through various musical landscapes, ranging from piano recitals amidst the clinking of teacups in smoke-filled drawing rooms to crepuscular pastoral and Noirish escapades on the open road, he now finds himself on a new shore. His growing interest in the sonority of found objects, field recordings, sound art and tape experiments will provide him with the tools for his next voyage. Find Stephan tinkering with radio space at SonicaFM alongside SoundFjord or musing over the potential sonic qualities of pine cones, the contents of a kitchinette, waterways, and objects found on more sturdy ground with his duo Postcards From the Volcano. The road continues to beckon for his elusive duo Georges Kaplan and there are other projects up ahead involving minimal synth/compositional collaboration.
Performance Info:
"After the furious storm the snow lies silent, settled in rising drifts. The line of the horizon is obscured as the land extends indefinitely into the pale cloudless sky. Faraway forests hide beneath their white blankets, their once well-travelled paths lying hidden and impenetrable. Dreams of a once promised spring lie dormant, buried under thick ice. High above, frozen mists hang wraithlike, forming an opaque filter through which only the sharpest rays of an enfeebled sun can pass. All but the highest mountain's glittering peak is plunged into a murky dusk which knows neither the passing of day or night. In this permanent twilight no sound breaks the hushed silence of the snow. Nothing stirs. Time halts, frozen.
And yet, faint distant sounds begin to rise faintly like smoke from the valley below. A stranger departs, laying their first fragile footprints on the start of a new journey..."
A sonic exploration of movement and stillness involving field recording, tape manipulation, and musical experimentation via a fourtrack recorder which takes as its starting point selected works by Claude Debussy, Enrique Granados, Leoš Janáček, Olivier Messiaen and Franz Schubert.
"Ce rhythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d'un fond de paysage triste et glacé"
C. Debussy, Des Pas Sur la Neige, Préludes Bk1.
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Juhana Moisander
is a Finnish artist living and working in Helsinki. His work has been widely displayed domestically and internationally. His methods have been linked to an ethnographical approach. He studies old and new stories and visual representations based on his interviews with people and research of museum collections and archives. Juhana combines this historical material with personal childhood memories or with the images from general story themes in order to create a scene or a situation in the given space. Horror/ fear and and a feeling of oddity are a part of Juhana´s image world. Traditionally it has been explained that horror and fear are created by a break-down of cultural categories and the inability to define them. This particular feeling in his art work surfaces through the past and the present, the stagnant and the moving/ mobile and the break-down of the barriers of space or the unidentifiable nature of things.
Installation Info:
Juhana will be presenting a winter-themed projection installation at Shorts For All Seasons.
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raxil4
is multi disciplinary sound and sculptural artist Andrew Page, he is active on the London sound art, improv and noise scenes. Page's works have been broadcast on terrestrial and internet radio, been featured on film soundtracks and his sound and installation works have been exhibited in art galleries internationally. He has collaborated with musicians, poets, actors, performance artists, sound artists and visual artists. He has performed many improvised concerts solo, duo, trio or as part of a large scale ensemble. Occasionally he performs vocals with harsh noise act Page & Drage. His dark brooding dronescapes combine analog and digital sound sources, including field recordings, detuned radios, analogue televisions, computers, turntables, CD & mp3 players, tape recorders, 8-bit gameboys, handmade electronic devices, broken vintage equipment and handmade sculptural instruments (made from mainly found materials such as hospital crutches, driftwood and bones reclaimed from the River Thames).
Performance Info:
For this performance raxil4 shall be performing a simple sine wave piece for 4 sine wave generators and reverb, incorporating the phenomena of monaural beats, derived from the convergence of two frequencies within a single speaker to create a perceivable pulse or beat.
In acoustics, a beat is an interference between two sounds of slightly different frequencies, perceived as periodic variations in volume whose rate is the difference between the two frequencies. Tuning two tones to a unison will present a peculiar effect: when the two tones are close in pitch but not identical, the difference in frequency generates the beating. The volume varies like in a tremolo as the sounds alternately interfere constructively and destructively. As the two tones gradually approach unison, the beating slows down and may become so slow as to be imperceptible.
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Andrew Vallance
is a filmmaker, writer and curator. He has screened work at Rotterdam and Locarno Film Festivals, Whitechapel Gallery, amongst others, and was co-curator of 'Assembly: A survey of recent artists’ film and video in Britain 2008–2013' at Tate Britain. He is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art and Associate Professor at Richmond University, where he teaches Art History and Visual Cultures.
Screening Info:
For the Winter edition of Shorts For All Seasons, Andrew presents two films:
Fog Line
Larry Gottheim
(1970, 11 mins, colour, silent)
"It is a small but perfect film."
Jonas Mekas
"The metaphor in Fog Line is so delicately positioned that I find myself receding in many directions to discover its source: The Raw and the Cooked? Analytic vs. Synthetic? Town & Country? Ridiculous and Sublime? One line is scarcely adequate to the bounty which hangs from fog & line conjoined."
Tony Conrad
Please note, the second film is TBC.
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Past Events
Short For All Season's inaugural event:
Shorts For Autumn
26 October 2014 | 3-6pm
Our Guests:
Joining us with sound performances, we are delighted to introduce:
Áine O'Dwyer
A talented musician, performer and composer. Áine's solo work varies in style and instrumentation, with experiments in composition, improvisation, chance, song, psycho-geography... Anything Bright or Startling? was her first vocal album, recorded in several different locations and released last year on the Second language label. October 2014 brings a reissue of her Music for Church Cleaners on MIE records, a double album of pipe organ meditations in an Islington church accompanying church cleaners who busily hover the floor and dust the empty pews. Currently, she is artist in residence at the Brunel Museum exploring sound in the Shaft tunnel, fifty feet below ground level and fourteen feet above the train rumblings. There, with her harp, voice and various other instrumentations, she investigates acoustic sound decay in a subterranean world.
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Ingrid Plum
Ethereal vocals and ambient instrumentation offset with folk melodies and darkly succinct wit. With the lilting clarity of her voice, Ingrid Plum blends traditional folk sensibilities with modern lyricism. Her songs tell stories delivering home truths with a cutting and amusing candour. Performing stripped back, intimate gigs often with only a capella vocals she entices you into her hushed world. Taking inspiration from artists such as J. Tillman and Mountain Man, Ingrid Plum’s site-specific recordings use minimal production techniques combined with a perfectionist’s attention to detail, capturing a raw integrity rarely heard before.
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And with a curated film programme, we are equally happy to introduce:
Carmen Billows
Carmen is a London-based independent curator, specialising on the moving image. Her curatorial practice has a strong affiliation with film performance and the site-specific video installation, reflecting the transition of film between different contexts. Most recently, the series of film screenings London Seizure reflected Carmen's on-going research interest in urbanism and the experience of urban space in film.
Carmen has curated the film programme POEMS ON DELIRIUM around notions of melancholia, paranoia and introspection featuring:
Yaron Lapid, Terms & Conditions Apply, 10.32 mins., video, UK, 2014
In form of a video diary the work remaps London through the eyes of an Israeli migrant. The investigative camera-eye captures an array of cultural and interpersonal situations in the everyday. At first glance banal they reveal a telling and imaginative double-life.
Oliver Bancroft - JGB Portrait Sketchbook, 4 mins.,video, UK, 2013
The film is a contained, intimate, moment. An attempt to recollect a traumatic event. It is a piece of work derived from a larger documentary work about schizophrenia, gaming and society.
Maya Inbar - Paralysed, 10.15 mins., video, UK, 2012
Paralysed presents a connection between personal-life facts and cinematic fiction, by means of film collage. It refers to a temporary face paralysis which afflicted the artist in 2009, and parallels it to an undiagnosed state in Bergman's “Persona” and to the character of Mickey in “Hanna and Her Sisters”. The catatonic state also finds a reference in Buster Keaton's Poker face, and in other images of a paralysed woman.
Michael Mazière, Delirium, 10 mins., SD Digital file, UK, 2002
Delirium, is an evocative and engaging work that deftly probes questions of desire and excess. Its hauntingly lyrical, yet formal architecture of reworked archival footage, classic film noir (including Billy Wilder's controversial 1945 The Lost Weekend), and surreal landscapes attests to Maziere's poetic inventiveness as one of Europe's leading cine-video artists working today. Delirium has an emotive, near hallucinatory style that takes on the romance of life's most existential passages. Its concerns are exquisitely related to intense human states rather than to ideas. With kinetic subtlety and insight, it draws from cinema, digital technology, poetry and psychoanalysis. By sifting through the melodramatic smoking remains of film noir, Mazière consummately brings a contemporary relevance to the genre's extreme psychological states." – On Delirium by John Conomos – Triptych Catalogue Essay, Prema Arts, 2002.
Yaron Lapid - You Have Not Found His Riddle, 12.40 mins., video, Israel, 2003
A seventy-year-old David Biton living in Israel wants to die. But death doesn't want him. (Julia Pascal)
Warren Garland - Poem, 1.04 mins., super 8, UK, 2006
Poem is a good bye to a close friend. Shot near the artist's birthday in October when the days get shorter and you start witnessing sunrises more often, the work recalls nostalgia. The re-looping of the footage suggests a memory recall, or "remembering memories" an incessant action that can falsify the original. The poem An Old-Fashion Song by American poet John Hollander is based on a French nursery rhyme.
Stephen Connolly - Film for Tom, 12 mins., SD video, UK, 2005
Based on a single evening’s sound recording with Tom, this film is a lyrical homage to a friend and formative influence. Tom is eloquent and effusive, yet finds no resolutions to the issues that haunt him. Yet to whom is he speaking and how - is his speech a lecture or a conversation? Near the conclusion of the film, a dramatic off-screen event complicates our understanding of the images and spaces we have seen. How do we understand the domestic space shown - is it home or the scene of a crime?
Programme duration: 60 mins.
Artists' Biographies
Yaron Lapid is an artist and filmmaker. His work is experimental, typically exploring social side effects and behaviours in his surroundings, often in the context of re-examining the conventions of photography and moving images. Exhibitions include Second sight, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, In your neighbourhood, The Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (2012), Boston Underground Film Festival (2010), Chicago Underground Film Festival (2009), Nervous System, The James Taylor Gallery, London, UK (2009), Trust Yourself – New Works UK, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2007), One Must Be Careful These Days, Alma Enterprises gallery, London (2007). http://www.finderandkeeper.co.uk/
Maya Inbar was born in Brazil in 1979, moved to Israel in 2005 and to the UK in 2011. She currently lives and works in London. She graduated at Hamidrasha School of Arts, Israel, in 2010; during her studies she was awarded two prizes, and has been invited to represent the school at the Student’s Biennale in Italy in 2009. In September 2014, she completed her studies at the MFA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in London. Main group shows include After Cinema at Yaffo 23 in Jerusalem, and MomentMAL at the Werkbund Conference in Koblenz. http://www.mayainbar.com
Michael Maziere is an artist and curator currently Reader in Film and Video at the University of Westminster, London. Mazière shows his films and videos internationally, venues include the Tate Gallery, London and MOMA, New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Videobrasil, Sao Paulo and they have been acquired by the collections of the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art of Japan, the National Collection of Australia and the National Film Archives of the British Film Institute. His films are also regularly selected for International competition at Festivals in London, Oberhausen, Basle, Berlin, Rotterdam and New York.
His early films were developed with an attention to analogue materials and through the creative use of optical and mechanical cameras, printers and processors. Today, Mazière is best known for his work in which Hollywood fiction and autobiographical fact are distilled into a poetic form. Mazière practices what he calls ‘cine-video’, a multilayered, intertextual fusion of the cultural and the personal, which shifts the emphasis back to the power of individual vision. Through this process the work reconstructs a meaningful subjectivity from the saturated world of images that surround us. He is represented by the Lux, London, the New York Film-maker’s Co-operative and Light Cone, Paris, France.
http://lux.org.uk/collection/works/delirium
Stephen Connolly's work investigates cinema and representation through place, politics and history. His single screen work has been widely shown internationally since 2002. A FLAMIN award recipient, he has had solo screenings at the ICA and BFI Southbank in London, and was a juror at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, USA) in 2011.
http://lux.org.uk/collection/artists/steve-connolly
Warren Garland is a filmmaker and a visual artist living and working in London. Garlands work is an investigation on the grammar of cinema, the relationship between visual arts and the cinematic experience and everyday life. He uses the language of film to manoeuver and influence the interpretation of time and narratives. He manipulates time, cuts and re-layers images and scenarios from various films and cartoons to create a new relevant world from an old redundant stock. http://www.warrengarland.co.uk/index.html
Oliver Bancroft was born in 1976 in Cambridge, UK, and graduated in 2003 with an MA in Fine Art from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Solo / group exhibitions and screenings include Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2014; ESPS, Hastings; Transition Gallery, London; 2013, Blythe Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; S1 Salon, Sheffield, 2012, East End Film Festival, London; Studio 1.1, London, 2011, Hangar7, Salzburg, 2010, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, 2009, The Golden Record, Collective Gallery, 2008-2009, Fermynwoods Contemporary Arts, Northamptonshire, 2008, Re:voir, Paris; Karin Sachs Galerie, Munich, 2007,London, 2006, Zoo Art Fair, 2006 and 2005; Young Masters, Art Fortnight, London; Rough Diamond, Program, London; The World, Abridged, Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2004. He lives and works in London. http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/artists/oliver-bancroft