Oxdox:MK and Ovada Present
An exhibition and two forum events.
OurSpace at Ovada Gallery
A special exhibition with accompanying events at OVADA March 3rd-24th 2007.
Exhibition dates:
3rd-24th March
Preview date and time:
Tuesday 6th March 6.00 - 8.00pm
OVADA opening times:
Tues, Wed, Fri: 10-5, Thurs 10- 8, Sat 11-4.
The Exhibition
Five artists reveal their explorations of rural and urban spaces.
OurSpace featuring artists Edwina FitzPatrick: Emily Richardson, Alun Ward, Oliver Smith and Tom Ellis. OurSpace makes visible their explorations of both rural and urban spaces, through video, installation, animation, sound and photography.
OurSpace: Cities
Thursday 15th March at 6.00 p.m. - 8.00 p.m.
Forum Speakers: Xiao Lianwang Haihe Economic Development Office, Tianjin; Will Cousins - David Lock Associates; Malcolm Smith, Alejandro Gutierrez - Ove Arup; Edwina Fitzpatrick - Wimbledon College of Art; Emily Richardson - filmmaker
Who decides, and how, on the development of our cities? OurSpace presents three speakers with a major influence in this area. Tianjin,a city of 10.4 million (2004) North of Beiijing, is a new town that has been built around an old existing one. Ove Arup are responsible for planning the new ‘Eco-City’ Dongtan in China, - a new paradigm in urban development. David Lock Associates are very much involved in the past and present development of Milton Keynes.
OurSpace: Wilderness
Thursday 22 March at 6.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m.
Forum Speakers: Roz Mortimer, Director of 'Invisible screening at Oxdox:MK; Xiaoyan Men Director of 'Chiru' screening at Oxdox:MK; Cai Ga, Head of Wildlife Conservation Bureau in Tibet; Luo Yanhai, Police Superintendent and Muma Zhaxi. Police Inspector, policing the Tibetan Plateau
As the world's wilderness is getting smaller each year, the contributors to this second part of OurSpace will talk about their work in the most remote parts of our planet.
Edwina FitzPatrick
Edwina FitzPatrick’s Arboreal Laboratory was developed through working as artist in residence at King’s Wood in Kent, over a two-year period. The work took the form of experiments, which fused artistic and scientific languages to explore the nature (in every sense of the word) of the forest. The resulting work is three inter-linked installations: Cage - a sound loop of birdsong over the annual migratory cycle; In mythology the Gods always smelt good - a scent work presented in blown glass alembics, revealing four scent moments from the woods; and Transpiration - a video triptych featuring squirrels planting an apple tree, and mobile phone ring tones mimicking birdsong.
The work is a sensory response to what is essentially an unknowable place- one that vision alone cannot fathom. It is also about transitions, about what happens when the experience of a forest is relocated in an urban context. The three artworks raise issues about longing, our understanding of the natural environment, and how we might engage with, and create work, in a place which changes momentarily, seasonally, and annually.
The mobile phone birdsong was developed with composer, Matthew King, and the scent was created in collaboration with the head-space team and perfumers from Quest International plc. Stour Valley Arts commissioned the residency. The experiments and their findings are revealed in a scented publication, Arboreal Laboratory which is available through Cornerhouse publications.
Emily Richardson
Emily Richardson has remarked ‘a major motive of my films is to make things visible that are normally not seen because we do not have the patience to look long enough’. In these compelling films, Richardson carefully constructs a fabrication of reality – an acceleration of a process that if watched in real-time would be excruciatingly slow. Using techniques that include time lapse and long exposure the image as described by Richardson ‘works with that which is between the visible and the invisible’.
Emily Richardson - Aspect
Aspect is filmed in a forest over the period of a year . Colour, light and shadow shift across the surface of the forest as the period of a year is condensed into nine minutes. Fragments of unconscious forest sounds, ants in the anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig are re-configured into an audio piece by Benedict Drew that articulates the film.
Emily Richardson - Nocturne
Nocturne is shot entirely at night in deserted streets around the East End of London and Docklands. The film attempts to find images of London at night that reveal the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, hinting at its concealed history. The drab empty streets are transformed as they appear in hyper-real colour, devoid of human activity.
Emily Richardson - Petrolia
Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.
Emily Richardson - Redshift
Redshift In astronomical terminology ‘redshift’ is a term used in calculating the distance of stars from the earth, hence determining their age. Redshift attempts to show the huge geometry of the night sky and give an altered perspective to the landscape that reveals aspects of the night that are invisible to the naked eye.
Emily Richardson - Block
Block Day through night BLOCK is a portrait of a 1960’s London tower block, it’s interior and exterior spaces explored and revealed, patterns of activity building a rhythm and viewing experience not dissimilar from the daily observations of the security guard watching the flickering screens with their fixed viewpoints and missing pieces of action.
Block was made over a period of 10 month period in a tower block in south east London from 2004 –05. The film is a portrait of the place that came out of much time spent there. The contrast between the exterior and interior of the building, the impersonal common spaces and the personal spaces of the interior of people’s flats gives shape to the portrait.
The soundtrack was built up from recordings made on location at the time of shooting and sounds gathered from various sources and was composed and mixed by Jonah Fox.
Alun Ward
Oxford based artist Alun Ward will be showing the animated film Shadow Me, where a character bearing similarities to Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl travels far and wide throughout an imagined landscape, with and without his shadow.
Oliver Smith & Tom Ellis
In addition, recent graduate from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art; Oliver Smith and recent Oxford Brookes University graduate Tom Ellis will both be exhibiting photographs that contribute to an exploration of OurSpace. On a recent trip to China, Smith has captured unusual collisions between nature and artifice. Ellis’s work reveals a selective process of observation, focused on the junctions that join buildings together, examining stylized dead space.
