Day 1 | Dave Ball

Interview with a House Plant is a re-enaction of a celebrated 1985 television interview between Melvyn Bragg and the painter Francis Bacon. I take on the role of Bragg, while Bacon is played by a house plant.

My work stages irrational behaviours, actions and thought-processes. Works often follow absurd logic (e.g. changing my t-shirt to match the colour of trains passing behind me), or enact absurd premises (e.g. spending 6 months visiting a museum in order to repeatedly look at the same painting – hoping that it might start providing some meaning to my life), or interact with the world in ways that are simply “wrong” (playing a game of table-tennis against nobody).

By playfully breaking certain rules and conventions in ways which might be understood as “irrational” or “absurd”, I investigate the implications of causing “minor-ruptures” to normality, aiming therefore to reveal something of the structure of sense itself.
I’m also interested in exploring the mechanics of humour as a tool with which boundaries of normality and sense can be transgressed. Even if only momentarily humour allows conventional thought patterns to be reconfigured, allowing access to potentially subversive realms of thought and action.

Interview with a House Plant – TRT 13:00 mins

Dave Ball (b. Swansea, UK, 1978) is an artist and writer based in Berlin. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, London and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Derby, UK. Through his cross-disciplinary practice, Ball explores the notion of a “rupture of sense” at work in various modes of seeing, thinking and behaving, and particularly as it is manifested in humour. Recent works include an absurdist-existentialist video investigation into landscape “Being Somewhere”, and an ongoing drawing project “A to Z”, which aims to produce a drawing for every noun in the English dictionary, starting at “a”. A current curatorial project is “Ha Ha Road”, a humour-themed group exhibition showing at Oriel

Dave Ball – Berlin Germany

www.daveballartist.co.uk

Day 2 | Jonas Nilsson

How do we know precisely what constitutes “normality” or mental illness? Conventional wisdom suggests that specially trained professionals have the ability to make reasonably accurate diagnoses.

What is — or is not — “normal” may have much to do with the labels that are applied to people in particular settings.

Sometimes people are ashamed to something they did at some insane time of life.
Maybe insane is a little strong. But there are stages, when a person is less in control, has less desire to be disciplined, has no incentive for discipline. When a person does things that a person in their right mind would never do.

The Looney Room – TRT 2:50 mins.

I am an artist who works with contemporary art there moving image is my major way of expression. I was born 1964 in Sweden there I went to a couple of art schools before I took my MFA degree in the year 2000 at Norwich School of Art & Design, UK.

I am currently interested in issues surrounding the stressful and high tempo of the western way of life and increasing amounts of time and money spent by individuals on becoming successful, and the consequences of such achievements. I often relate my work to a dark dystopian and/or melancholic places or landscapes, both in an inner-world and outer-world.

My works have mainly been shown at videoscreenings and video art festivals in Europe, north America, and in China and Taiwan.

I am the co-founder and curator of art:screen which is an international event and platform focusing on video art. 2012 art:screen will be the head co-ordinator for art:screen fest, a festival where the main concept is to invite curators from different video art events and video art festivals from around the world to curate screening programmes, and to be an international platform for networking and co-operation possibilities between curators.

Jonas Nilsson – Örebro Sweden

www.jonasnilsson.org

Day 3 | Mike Winkelmann

Watch as the American housing market spirals out of control. An urgent cry for simplicity, Subprime uses a constantly rotating isometric perspective to illustrate the current subprime mortgage crisis in the United States. Every successive house that is built folds into itself and sprouts the growth of a bigger one, only to repeat the ultimately futile process again.

subprime – TRT 2:27 mins.

Beeple is Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. His short films have screened at onedotzero, Prix Ars Electronica, the Sydney Biennale, Ann Arbor Film Festival and many others. He has also released a series of Creative Commons live visuals that have been used by electronic acts such as deadmau5, Taio Cruz, Tiësto, Paul van Dyk, Amon Tobin, Wolfgang Gartner, The Glitch Mob, Flying Lotus and many others. He currently releases work on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint.

Mike Winkelmann – Appleton WI

www.beeple-crap.com

Day 4 | Tim Busko

Space Thing is a collage of black and white imagery employing photographs, 16mm film, super 8 home movies and stop-motion animation to recall the fragmented nature of dreams and old memories; it was inspired by, and features, the electronic music of Manherringbone. There was never any intended symbolism in the use of the images, my only concern was to construct something that was interesting to look at.

Space Thing – TRT 3:30 mins.

Tim studied filmmaking at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and is currently employed working in a dusty ware- house. His first film, an experimental short called Space Thing, premiered in 2004 at the Three Rivers Film Festival and went on to play at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival; he recently completed his second film, a feature length documentary called Half A Bee. Tim lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife, a new baby, a three-legged chicken and a stuffed chin- chilla.

Manherringbone is one man, Bob Saunders, and has been recording and performing experimental music for over 10 years. Using all analog equipment in unintended ways has always been the inspiration for the project. The sound itself is flowing and unpredictable, ranging from echoing resonant pulses to extreme bursts of harsh noise. Bob’s whereabouts are currently unknown.

Tim Busko – Huntingdon PA

http://buskopolisfilms.com

Day 5 | Deborah Wing-Sproul

Performance and ephemeral objects suggest elements of time and impermanence. In my work I use these elements as metaphors for the vulnerable, temporal nature of the collective human experience. In Tidal Culture, I’m interested in using aspects of time and impermanence to address and reflect upon current conditions of the world as well as the relationships between and among cultures.

Tidal Culture is a long-term nomadic work using the Atlantic Ocean as a focal point and
primary resource. Part I began on the shoreline of Maine and has since continued onto five additional sites bordering the North Atlantic: Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and the Outer Hebrides. The North Atlantic chapter of this work will conclude in Ireland.

There are two primary components to this work: “performance” and object making. In the performative work I use video to document very still sittings. More specifically, I am relatively still while the ocean remains active. All of the sites are chosen based on their relationship to the ocean; in each location, I select a position that will allow me to have a direct site line to the center of the Ocean. My back is turned to the camera or viewer while facing the water. The act of sitting at a shoreline, observing the ocean may seem unremarkable. I’m concerned with what is not readily visible; what takes place over time; and how states of mind, like conditions of the earth, require time to experience, observe and understand. Each site is documented with similar sittings, which are recorded in real time and then exhibited using single-channel video projections. I witness each site in durational sittings, which are documented by one-hour videos, shot continuously with no edit cuts. My particular positions on the edge of the world are intended to question personal perspective and to invite dialogue between one place and another.

Tidal Culture: Part III – Latitude 65.570N / Longitude –37.890W – TRT 60:00 mins.

Deborah Wing-Sproul is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video, film, sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and printmaking. Her multi-disciplinary background includes modern dance and choreography, having studied with Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk as well as many other notable performers. She later went on to study at the School of Visual Arts, NYC; Film/Video Arts, NYC; the International Film + Television Workshops, Rockport, ME; and holds an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Her films and videos have been shown in numerous festivals and exhibitions internationally. She was a re-performer in four works for the retrospective, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” (MoMA, 2010); elements from her Tidal Culture series are on view as part of “Under the Sea”, a six-person exhibition at MASS MoCA’s Kidspace, through May 2012; Wing-Sproul is developing a new ensemble video, which will preview this Spring in a five person group exhibition curated by Julie Poitros-Santos at the Coleman Burke Gallery in Brunswick, Maine. Wing-Sproul will begin a new volume of Tidal Culture, broadening her ocean-based works to encompass all of the oceans of the world, while the North Atlantic chapter of this series concludes in Ireland.

Deborah Wing-Sproul – Portland Maine

www.deborahwingsproul.com

Day 6 | Tommaso Caverni

The title of this video is inspired mostly by its movie quote: “Volevo farti felice – I wanted to make you happy”, taken from Eclipse, a film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Even if words like “happy” or “happiness” would seem at the very first look to be related to positive concepts, the past tense reveals remorse for not having achieved the expected results, for not having done enough. At the same time, the green field hides something dark on the bottom of the screen, in the roots of happiness.

For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word ”meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. – Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §43

Thinking about my work, this Wittgenstein’s consideration comes often to my mind, because I prefer to employ the visual language without knowing what I’m going to say. As well as it is for any other experience, an observer has to build the underlying meanings of my works. He has to take part in what he’s looking at.

Roots of Happiness – TRT 1:14 mins.

Born in 1981 in Fiesole, Tuscany, I am a musician, a video editor and a visual artist. While attending the Artistic Lyceum of Florence, I’ve been a singer and saxophone player in a noise and ad-lib environment. In 2001, I worked as an actor in the Marco Parente’s video clip shot by Graziano Staino, with whom I’m recently collaborating in editing and composing of several stage shows’ DVD. After graduating in 2007 in Modern History, I have realized many clips as an author, both for contests or exhibitions, among which “Mind the Difference” in 2009, where I was finalist with my short film “Il Pieno Controllo – The Full Control”.

Tommaso Caverni – Florence Italy

Day 7 | Jean-Michel Rolland

Five arms are struggling to silence three telephones, an alarm clock and a timer without success. This rejection of communication and more generally of what connects us to time is a pretext for a new experimentation where you “hear what you see” and vice versa. These simple gestures, intended to break an unwanted process, are repeated in a quasi-schizophrenic way. The result is a choreographic and musical fight that will end with some effort.

Acommunication – TRT 5:29 mins.

Jean-Michel Rolland, a musician for a long time then a painter, focus on video art to make his two favorite medium meet: sound and image. At the origin of each of his creations, musicality plays a role as important as image does and each one influences the other by transmediality. The result is a series of experimental videos where sound and image are so inseparable that the one without the other would lose its meaning.

He particularly appreciates using short sequences (samples) and repeat them all along his experimentations, wishing to transfigure commonplaces into coherent work. The sequences are treated as mere utensils, found objects, used to create visual and musical compositions at a time.

Unlike Scriabine’s, Kandinsky’s or even Schoenberg’s works, neither sound or image come first ; the two mediums take birth in a same creative impulse intended to be reactivated.

Jean-Michel Rolland – Paris France

http://franetjim.free.fr

Day 8 | Julie Perini

This film is the result of a collaboration between Julie Perini and the Earth. Julie used an old advertisement by General Electric about a woman alone on a dark street who seems scared but at the end of the ad she looks up to see lights have gone on and she feels safe. Julie cut this film into two-second strips (48 frames) and buried it in the ground. Each day for 20 days, she unearthed a strip of film and she then pieced it all back together. The dirt, water, worms and other earthly forces decayed the film and this final piece shows this gradual deterioration over time.

Collaboration With The Earth – TRT 1:14 mins.
16mm transferred to digital video, 2011

Julie Perini (b. 1977, Poughkeepsie, NY) is an artist working in video, film, audio, installation, and performance, living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has exhibited at the Northwest Film Festival in Portland, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco, Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and other national and international venues. She has had solo exhibitions and screenings in New York City, Ithaca, Buffalo, Rochester, Los Angeles, Portland, Lake Tahoe, and Rome, Italy. She is a recipient of the 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Cross-Disciplinary/Performative work. Julie holds a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.F.A. from the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. Her writing on performance, video, and socially engaged art has been published in books and periodicals including A.K. Press, Afterimage, and INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics. Julie has been involved with collaborative initiatives that promote independent media, community cultural production, and progressive social change. She is the Assistant Professor of Video Art/Time-based Media at Portland State University.

Julie Perini – Portland OR

http://julieperini.org

Day 9 | Alvaro Campo

In eastern philosophies,“Nothingness“ can be interpreted as the space that contains thoughts, the formless that contains form, meaning that the one cannot exist without the other.A famous Zen story tells about a Frog that is led from it’s native pond to the ocean and when coming over the last hill and finally seeing the ocean that had previously only been described to it in words; it’s head explodes.The human condition implies a search for and a necessity to find a meaning to the fragile and fleeting nature of existence. Skyping with Descartes describes and illustrates the absurdity of analyzing one’s way through the struggles of life and suggests a more direct and playful approach by disappearing into the great oceans of ”nothingness”.

Skyping with Descartes – TRT :34 seconds

Alvaro Campo, born 1972 is a Spanish/Swiss artist, based in Stockholm Sweden. Alvaro is a multi-disciplinary artist and his range of work goes from drawing, photography and performance to video and installation art. He is co-founder of several art collectives (www.glimp.se, http://www.candyland.se and http://www.hammarbyartport.se) and has also curated many exhibitions during the past eight years at Candyland / artist-run initiative in Stockholm.Alvaro has participated in both group and solo exhibitions in sweden and internationally. He has just recently received several grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee to develop his work.

Alvaro Campo – Stockholm Sweden

www.singinginthebrain.net

Day 10 | Ian Swanson

In my video work I generally work within the format of short loops, in concert with limitations set by various pre-existing formats, from the web-based animation method of the .gif to the ubiquity and faux-cinematic quality of DVD menu screens. Quotes is edited and distilled from downloaded Youtube clips, in this case based on a search for “quotes” and “stock quotes”, and selecting an appropriate search result. A short clip of an LED stock ticker is overlaid on a Youtube user-generated collection of the top 100 popular movie quotes. The resulting video is looped continuously.

Quotes – TRT 3:10 mins.

Working primarily with abstract paintings, conceptually driven sculpture and video, and pseudo-mystical, idiosyncratic performance projects, Ian Swanson creates works that seem to exist within the liminal state between their own dissolution and causation.

Using the creative process as a catalyst towards the investigation of cultural and generational styles and modalities, he presents a casual, fluid, and often contrary attitude towards exposing the “tenuous relationship between what we reveal and what remains unseen.” In his works, investigations of previously disregarded possibilities toil through repeated actions, with an intention of escaping the expected outcome.

In challenging common applications of material and forms of representation, Swanson creates works that are both raw and highly sophisticated, inviting viewers to embark on their own explorations of existing references and conventions.

Ian Swanson received his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He is represented in Southeastern Michigan by Re:View Contemporary, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where he is attending Pratt Institute as an MFA Candidate.

Ian Swanson – Brooklyn NY

www.iancswanson.com

Day 11 | Matthew Newman

Collage paper stop-motion animation. Influenced by the first chapter of Dracula amongst many other things. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

And What We Move Is Dead – TRT 13:43 mins.

Media Production Coordinator – Hampshire College
Adjunct Faculty – Emerson College
Greenfield Community College
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
Springfield Tech Community College

Mount Emult/Matthew Newman-Long is a film/video maker/destroyer, musician/magician, father/afterfather, performance/performer/installer, comic/doodle/psychedelic collager.
He has won awards and been credited for doing “really ecstatic” stuff.

Matthew Newman – Swimming in beautiful oil

https://vimeo.com/mountemult

Day 12 | Arzu Ozkal & NANETTE YANNUZZI

“Mission: Cleveland Land Mass,” is a wry commentary on the amount of abandoned land in the city of Cleveland. Using 3-D technology the artists urge viewers to experience the obvious, the familiar and the ignored through the distorted lens of the camera.

When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969 the world viewed the incomprehensible from their living rooms. In “Mission: Cleveland Land Mass” we are reenacting ‘first steps’ in a visual exploration of Cleveland’s abandoned land.

The portrayal of these post-industrial landscapes is homage to Marx’s idea of alienation; they bring forth the consequences of abstraction; the unforeseen destruction we cause to our environment as a result of our separation from the results of our own production.

Mission: Cleveland Land Mass – 3D Video – TRT 8:00 mins.
(Arzu Ozkal and Nanette Yannuzzi with Outhere Productions)

Arzu Ozkal is a Turkish born media artist and designer. Her practice engages with different interpretations of the body and its relationship to the environment. She raises questions about dogmas, traditions, laws, and patriarchal value systems through videos, public interventions and performances. Ozkal received her MFA from the Department of Visual Studies at University at Buffalo (SUNY) and BFA from Bilkent University.

Her work has been exhibited broadly in exhibitions and festivals nationally and internationally. Prior to joining San Diego State University as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in Fall 2011, she spent three years on the faculty in the Art Department at Oberlin College teaching new media practices.

Arzu Ozkal – San Diego CA

http://contrary.info

Nanette Yannuzzi was born in El Paso, Texas. Her work is comprised of actions, deliberations, collaborations, and writings that respond or dialog with the social, personal and political machinations of the everyday.

She received her MFA from The University of California, San Diego, during which time she was also a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is based in Oberlin, Ohio where teaches at Oberlin College & Conservatory.

Nanette Yannuzzi – Oberlin OH

http://nymacias.com

Day 13 | Gerald Guthrie

“Gerald Guthrie uses the medium of digital animation to identify and exemplify many of the inscrutable mysteries of everyday life. Questions that do not have definitive answers are woven into the fabric of our culture and become the basis for such uniquely human pursuits as religion, ethics, philosophy, politics, and science. By distinguishing common threads of recognition, he strives to inform the viewer that closure is not as important as the act of enquiry, a process essential to the human experience.”

The Necessities of Life – TRT 5:03 mins.

Gerald Guthrie was born in 1951 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He received a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Illinois (1977). Guthrie currently teaches animation and foundation studies as a Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. His digital animations have screened in over 75 national and international film festivals, including the Melbourne Animation Festival (Australia 2011), Anima Mundi (Brazil 2010), The Seattle Film Festival (2011), the Denver Film Festival (2010) and the Prix Ars Electronica International Festival of Arts and New Media (Austria 2008, 2010).

Gerald Guthrie – Urbana IL

geraldguthrie.com

Day 14 | Shahar Marcus

The video leap of faith starts with a shot of the artist wearing a suit, standing on the window’s edge, getting ready to make the leap of his life to the wide open space. The artist is hesitating, having difficulties in creating a momentum to jump, but eventually jumps. Surprisingly he freezes horizontally, while his feet touch the window’s edge – homage to the known work of Yves Klein “Artist jumps into the void (1959). When the shot opens up it appears that the window from which the artist was afraid to jump is just a few feet above ground. The camera stands still presenting a grotesque and surreal image of the artist hanging between heaven and earth.

The camera focuses on the artist’s point of view, who wants to break through from the inside to the outside. The artist is presented trying to jump out of the window, like Icarus who tried to climb up and reach the sun, when his ambition is to overcome gravity and his own fears with the help of willpower and courage. The artist chooses to do so in an exhibitionist way, through a huge window, that allows everyone around to see the struggle of the artist and watch his fears. By the leap through the window the artist eliminates the physical barrier as he breaks through. The surrealist position of the artist where his feet touch the sill and his body is suspended between heaven and earth merger the inside and outside.

In the video the artist chooses to use the window in an unusual way, in order to achieve his goal. The artist’s fear, arising from a possible failure, leads to hesitation in accomplishing his goal. The failure, however, is not so painful as the window is just a few feet away from the ground. The work criticizes two characteristics of the human nature. One is the fear form failure and social criticism that can paralyze and prevent breaching borders, while in many cases, like in the work, such fears are only in the person’s (the artist) eyes, as the fall is not so painful. The second is wining glory at any price, where like in the work – the act seems heroic, in the artist’s perception, while it seems grotesque in for the viewers.

Leap of Faith – TRT 3:03 mins.

Shahar Marcus (Israel 1971) is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in video, performance and sculpture. In his works he relates his body to organic and perishable materials, such as dough, bread, juice or ice. His relationship to the materials examines the position and the role of his body as both human and creator. His choice of perishables likewise highlights the nature of art and life

Marcus had exhibited in many exhibitions around the world including Tate modern in London, The Israel and the Tel Aviv museum in Israel, The Charlottenburg kunsthhalle in Copenhagen, The Moscow and Poznan Biennale and other venues in Germany France, Italy and Usa.

Shahar Marcus – Tel Aviv Israel

www.shaharmarcus.com

Day 15 | Daniel Hopkins

Daniel Hopkins work is about escape, about travelling, about journeys along the way. Through the medium of sound and vision Hopkins creates work that takes you to another place that makes you think about the landscape we live in and also question it.

Circa was commissioned as a set of four films for musician Tim Diagram and his project Maps & Diagrams. This is the second of the four films which were commission to go alongside the release of two records on the Japanese record label Nomadic Kids Republic, This music track is from the record “The Town Beneath The Sea”.

Circa – TRT 4:27 mins.

Daniel Hopkins (b.1976) is a Filmmaker & Sound Artist based in Staffordshire, UK.
Originally from the Southwest of England. Hopkins started his career as a filmmaker graduating from Newport Film School in 1998. During his time as a student he started to experiment with sound during his student films. This led to use of computer to compose and lead to Hopkins moving into sound editing as a career choice.

This sound editing experimentation led to creation of sound pieces, which stood alone as works apart from the films. Though Hopkins professional career has always been based around filmmaking. The music/sound he has created has always played an equal part.
In the last 15 years Hopkins has made a broad variety of films and music. These films have been made as commissions for the Arts Council of England, Channel Four, Various Local County Councils and many many musicians.

His work has defied genre over the years but has fitted well into the avant-garde and experimental sections the arts. Hopkins work has been shown at many film festivals, art galleries, cinemas, radio stations, locally and internationally. Hopkins has collaborated with a broad selection of artists and musicians including The Telescopes, Füxa, Mountain Men Anonymous, Epic 45, Soulo, Arcade, Herzoga, and Spectrum Fires. Hopkins performs and releases music under the names of Hurra caine Landcrash, HL and Landcrash He has performed over the years with the likes of Scanner, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Greg Davis, Schneider TM, Christ, and many others. As well making films and music Hopkins worked along side others in a variety of creative collectives.

No Ground Processes who formed to create innovative music and film events in South Wales, in 1998. No Ground Processes evolved other the years into a gig visuals troop and eventually into a record label called noground-r, which has released a number of Hurra caine Landcrash releases.
Throughout these creative endeavours Hopkins has held full time positions as a Sound Editor, Technical demonstrator of film & video technology and currently a senior lecturer in film at Staffordshire University.

Daniel Hopkins – Staffordshire UK

www.landcrash.co.uk

Day 16 | Matthew C. Lange

Upon recognizing that The Plummet Machine (which is a pataphysical social apparatus) governs all relationships of authority and power in contemporary society, I set about conducting a series of aesthetic, theoretical, and rhetorical investigations concerning its structure and order. Presented as performances, photographs, videos, texts, and mixed media sculptures, these inquiries typically satirize, critique, or reiterate the workings of The Plummet Machine. While overthrowing The Plummet Machine is clearly impossible, the goal of this work is to subvert its control for the purpose of activating subjectivity.

Appendage B – TRT 4:09 mins.

Matthew C. Lange was born in Buffalo, NY on June 12, 1979. In the Spring of 2011, he received his MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Investigations concerning the order and structure of The Plummet Machine have been conducted in and around New York, where Matthew C. Lange lives and works.

Matthew Lange – New York NY

http://matthewclange.com

Day 17 | Alys Williams

Watercolour is a video painting from Williams’ series Transitory Sites, which explores the boundary between the built and natural environment. The series of works presents this boundary as a tense and fragile equilibrium between the two competing forces which encourages the viewer to consider the long term ephemerality of the built environment. Seemingly solid structures are poised, balanced and submerged within landscapes that existed long before them and will be there long after.

Whilst commentators claim each technological advance as a sign of our mastery over nature, Williams succeeds in delicately portraying the natural world as a patient, steady and unyieldingly permanent force. The absence of human inhabitation saturates the works adding to the forlorn drama of these forgotten spaces and allowing the slow and quiet battle between leaf and lintel, sea and stone to play out in isolation.

“My video painting practice for Open Gallery is an opportunity for me to explore the richness of architecture, focusing on buildings that through habitation have a voice, which communicates history and memory, both real and imagined. Looking at temporary visual imprints such as light, shadow, nature and people, I examine contrasts between solid and fluid, stillness and movement and surface and depth.” Alys Williams, 2008

Watercolour – TRT

Alys Williams (b. London 1979) is a multimedia artist. Her work draws from the relationship between architecture and narrative, investigating the poetic qualities of the places we inhabit and constructing dialogues from past and present encounters with these surroundings.

She graduated from Camberwell College of Arts with a BA Visual Arts: Sculpture in 2002 and went on to gain a MA Scenography at Central Saint Martins College of Art in 2004. Between 2005 and 2007, she moved to Italy, which influenced much of her video works. She is now based in London.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including; The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; Jerwood Space, London; UMAM D&R Beirut, Lebanon; The British School at Rome, Italy; PULSE Miami, USA; Shunt Vaults, London and Dilston Grove, London.

Williams is also a curator and in 2010 set up the contemporary art space Vitrine Gallery, for which she is creative director. She has also curated the major video prize and exhibition The Open Prize for two years with Open Gallery and worked on a number of other independent projects.

Williams’ Transitory Sites Video Painting series is represented by Open Gallery, a London gallery dedicated to the video painting series: a new form of video art that began with a philosophy. http://www.opengallery.co.uk

Alys Williams – London UK

www.alyswilliams.com