In June Art Through Touch organised at touch tour at the Serpentine to experience the German artist Andreas Slominski's work.
Slominski gained a reputation as an artistic trickster, engaging in a practice that is, on one hand, brutal, and on the other, absurd. He is best known for the collection of traps, snares and decoys he has assembled since the mid-1980s. All designed to catch prey, they are highly varied in style, size and shape, ranging from toy mousetraps to large, complex and deadly contraptions - some found, some modified and some specially made.
Sculpturally and metaphorically, they form the basis of his work: in common with the prey the objects are designed for, Slominski's viewers become ensnared. His traps allude to the deceptive and seductive nature of art itself, and to the role of the artist in engaging the viewer. Another theme in Slominski's work involves displaying objects and images that are the culmination of ludicrously labour-intensive actions - for example, an envelope posted with a stamp that was licked by a giraffe!
Six Sites For Sound: A Sound Art Tour Visiting Three East End galleries - MOT, Alma Enterprises and Fortescue Avenue.
The three solo exhibitions by American artists Michael J. Schumacher and Keiko Uenishi and British artist Jem Finer are part of Six Sites For Sound, a project based around sound art and taking place in various contexts and venues throughout July 2005.
The tour started at Alma Enterprises with a visit to Jem Finer's sound installation Slowplayer. There was an introductory talk about the three artists' work and a discussion on how sound could be presented and interpreted in a visual arts gallery.
Slowplayer combined sound, sculpture and film. Every day, a record was played at extreme slow speeds, reducing the spin of a record player to a glacial crawl, the record to seismic rumbling. The record player becomes an object of contemplation, a meditation on the passing of time, gathering dust, entropic.
We then walked to a near MOT Gallery, which featured Michael J. Schumacher's immersive sound piece. Schumacher had filled the small space with sounds that are customised for the room by creating an installation that matched the acoustical and architectural properties of the space. About 29 speakers gathered in groups of 4-5 and treated as instruments, each playing one sound only.
We ended the tour at Fortescue Avenue, which was presenting a new work by Keiko Uenishi entitled Aboard: fillip2 This was a site-specific installation created for a cargo container located in the gallery's backyard. A 5 feet long light bulb flickered on and off with no regular pattern, commanded by a computer from which sound is generated. The room can be totally dark for 5-10 seconds. The sound that filled the room was actually subtle, restrained and minimal. It was impossible to tell if it was the light that was controlling the sound or if it is the sound that is controlling the light.
www.sixsites for sound.net this website is part of the recent Six Sites for Sound Project curated by Anna Colin and Tobi Maier. The site contains downloads of sound works and of project events including the Art Through Touch Clear Spot broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm.
Monika Sosnowska Touch Tour at the Serpentine Gallery
This interesting touch tour featured Monika Sosnowska's constructed environments that play with architecture through distortions of scale and shifts in proportion, radically transforming the experience of three-dimensional space. Obstructed corridors, interconnecting passageways and false doorways are common features in her work; visitors become completely immersed in her spaces and the resulting physical engagement can be strangely disconcerting.
The Serpentine had commissioned Sosnowska to make a new piece that alters the architecture and visitors' experience of the Gallery. A series of interlocking corridors and passages within a larger labyrinthine structure will both disorientate and confound the public's perception of the Serpentine's space.
Sosnowska was born in Ryki, Poland, in 1972. Although her work has been seen in several international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and Istanbul Biennale , both in 2003, and Manifesta 4 , in Frankfurt in 2002, this will be her first exhibition in a public art gallery in the United Kingdom.
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