Private View 8th September 6pm Thursday 8th September - Saturday 8th October 2011
Dan Shaw-Town's first solo-show with the gallery is an arrangement of four wall and floor based pieces. Each work contains a composition of graphite and spray paint covered paper, which has been heavily worked, creased and manipulated, or folded over on itself repeatedly.
The works employ conflicting elements. On the one hand, Shaw-Town demonstrates personal gesture in the dense build up of hand worked graphite. At the same time he alludes to the language of manufacture; wall works are of standardised size and nailed up using metal grommets, large areas of paper have been sectioned off and systematically sprayed with paint and floor based works are supported by rubber sheeting or industrial steel. The covering of graphite is gestural but also impersonal. It describes the exhaustive and repetitive series of actions to build up the surface, but the hand of the artist obliterates itself in repetition.
The work occupies a space somewhere between drawing and sculpture, concerned simultaneously with the pictorial and material. Wall pieces can be read as formally minimal compositions, but the folded floor based pieces hide the majority of their worked surface. Shaw-Town combines the materials of graphite, paint and paper, to produce a new substance, a new material, a process that isn't accurately described by the familiar moniker of graphite on paper.
OPEN SCORE BY ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Private View 8th September 6pm Thursday 8th September - Saturday 8th October 2011
A documentary by Barbro Schultz Lundestam Produced by Billy Kluver for Experiments in Art and Technology Edited by Ken Weissman Filmed by Alfons Schilling
In 1966 ten artists worked with more than thirty engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create works that incorporated new technology for 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. The artists included, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, David Tudor, Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg
Rauschenberg's work, Open Score, was a performance that started with Frank Stella playing tennis using wired rackets that produced an accompanying score and switched the stage lights off around the Armory. When completely dark, a crowd of 300 entered, the groups movements were projected onto three large screens only visible to the audience via infra-red cameras.
'Tennis is movement, put it in the context of theatre it is a formal dance improvisation. The unlikely use of the game to control the lights and to perform as an orchestra interests me. The conflict is not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action. A screen of light and a screen of darkness'
- Robert Rauschenberg, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, original program
Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg is a documentary produced using raw film and sound material from 9 Evenings that had been untouched in the E.A.T. archives for more than thirty years. In 1996 E.A.T. initiated a project to preserve this footage and use it to make films that reconstruct each of the ten artists' performances as faithfully as the material permits. Open Score and 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering marked a significant shift in the relationship between art and new technology, with a lineage and historical relevance that can be traced to many of today's current art practices and their engagement with new technologies.
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