VOICE/UNDER Viral

VOICE/UNDER

VOICE/UNDER is an investigation into the way artists use the tension between sound and image as a tool. The featured work uses the inherent contract and fusion between the two registers within its structure, sometimes to create disparity and at other times to collude in order to raise questions of perception, language and understanding. The resultant questions might lead us into obscurity, or intrigue us as to the narrative possibilities decided by the viewer’s individual interpretation of what they see and hear.

Featured works (more TBA):

John Smith – Gargantuan – ‘A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian.' - Elaine Paterson, Time Out.

Dan Walwin – Silencer – takes the recognisable form of an interrogation, and fragments it over two different locations and turns it inwards by the use of a single actor playing dual roles.

Andrew Brand and Alison Ballard – Wires and Bows - An experimental animation from a moving train comparing the movements of telegraph wires with the sounds of violins

Erica Scourti – Statement of the Art - Press releases taken from a wide range of contemporary art exhibitions are collaged together and translated into French, German and Spanish and back into English using internet translation software.

Emily Wilczek - Walk (in progress) – As the camera's motor kicks in, we hear its loud whirr, and the screen goes from black to the images being shot, by one of the walkers.

Gareth Hudson – Future Proof – ‘Telegnosis like a time-telescope - a rare gift, which allows one to look through the veil of the present into the future’

Jordan Baseman – More Than Religion

Curated by Ellie Russell, Dan Green and Amy Fisher.

Friday 7^th May 2010

Screenings at 7, 8 and 9 pm

Tickets £1.50 on the door (includes a glass of wine/soft drink) – Please e-mail in advance to book if possible.

Tickets cannot be purchased from Broadway Box Office

The White Box Studio

Broadway

14-18 Broad Street

Nottingham

NG1 3AL

Satellite Images

Call for Submissions - Voiceunder

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - Voiceunder

SIXES&SEVENS are hosting a one night screening event at the White Box Studio at Nottingham’s Broadway Media Centre. We are looking for moving image works, lasting no longer than five minutes that deal with the relationship between the image and the soundtrack/voiceover.

We are interested in work that plays with the tension between these two registers, touching upon the fusion that happens between a sound and an image when they occur at exactly the same time and the questions they ask each other.

The Screening will be held at the beginning of May (exact date tbc) and offers a great opportunity for artists to showcase their work in Nottingham’s exciting and innovative Media Centre.

Please send proposals or links to the moving image piece you are choosing to submit to:

sixesandsevens.submissions@hotmail.com

or - send us a DVD of your proposed moving image piece in its entirety to:

248 Alfreton Road,
Nottingham,
NG7 5LS

Your proposal must include documentation of previous work and a short description of your practice. (500 words MAX)

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS 12.00pm Friday 26th March

Satellite

Nottingham based art collective, Sixes & Sevens, will host their second event 'Satellite' in the café bar of Nottingham Contemporary. The show will feature work from an exciting range of artists and musicians from across the country in response to Nottingham Contemporary’s current exhibition 'Star City'. From Soviet ideals of the future to the Science fiction of the communist era, 'Star City' is a show dedicated to exploring past visions of the future as well as the legacy of the space race. For one night only, Sixes & Sevens will transform Café.Bar.Contemporary into a platform for discussion, performance and video that will serve to investigate further the themes of Nottingham Contemporary’s superb current exhibition.

Line up (more TBC)

Miss Hypnotique will be playing the Theremin, performing classical and popular Russian music including works played by Latvian Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore. The Theremin is the world's first electronic musical instrument, played without touch. It was invented in 1920’s Russia and represented the sonic values of the USSR. After playing the instrument Lenin declared ‘Soviet Russia equals Communism plus electrification’ before sending its inventor Lev Termin to Europe and USA to spread the Soviet electronic gospel.

Cosmunatic Peoples Unified Party Of Free Sound; Joey Bell along with members of ‘Cuban Crime Wave’ (taking their inspiration from German experimental band ‘Einsturzende Neubauten’) will perform a set using samples from sci fi movie scores.

Adam Goodge will give a performance lecture presentation uniting the works of two unlikely bedfellows, Karl Marx and Cliff Richard.

Aaron Williamson presents a cover version music video of David Bowie's ‘Drive-In Saturday’ which is performed entirely in British sign language by the artist and a team of silent, space age backing dancers.

Gareth Hudson presents a video art work based on an outlook on Ascension and the persistence of loss.

Wiracha Daochai will count down to the return of soviet ideology with his unique performance ‘Red Bomb’.

Meg Tait and Emily Birrell present an interactive installation. The latest gaming technology is explored as the Guitar Hero phenomenon is parodied in cardboard and is arguably more fun than ever.

Simon Raven will be performing as a ‘Star waiter’ throughout the evening offering the audience the chance to take a little piece of his costume away with them at the end of the night.

Sarah Duffy will be giving us a different take on David Hasselhoff’s legendary ‘Looking for Freedom’.

Gemma Land will be showing ‘THE LOST VIEWS OF SPACE CITY’, a photographic project investigating the Market Estate in North London. The estate was built in the sixties and was originally nicknamed ‘Space City’ by the press. The estate has been plagued with anti social problems since it was built and is now due to be demolished next month.


Satellite is curated by Meg Tait, Emily Birrell and Sarah Duffy

Part I Review

Reviewed by Jo Lee

Sixes and Sevens is the collective name for a group of recent graduates from Nottingham Trent University. I have to declare an interest here, given that I’m a lecturer on the Fine Art course from which they came, but owing to the peculiarities of my timetable I don’t currently work with students in the final year of their study, and thus came to their Surface Gallery show with a certain critical distance. But another interval has already opened up given that it’s now some two months since the exhibition had its short run, a period in which I had intended to set down more immediate critical reflections upon these works and the artists who produced them: and so it is that I find myself at yet more of a remove than I’d ever intended…

Of course, such a delay comes down to the usual pressures for artists/writers/academics, when it seems that the realities of professional life conspire to erase one’s own creative and critical space. And in this I find myself thinking about the realities for this most recent crop of artists emerging from University, who would doubtless love to be busy with deadlines of their own. Like countless of their peers elsewhere, all trying to make sense of who they want to be now the institution has ceased to define them, they are making do with jobs in service or retail industries, inching their way into potentially more satisfying, but frequently lower paid arts administration or simply trying to subsist for a while on meagre benefits, whilst all the while worrying about their student debt. The name of this grouping itself, Sixes and Sevens, immediately evokes the uncertainty pervading this stage of creative life, and the exhibition title Part 1 apparently designates this as a first step on the road to their creative career.

In the press release, however, the group asserted their ‘uncompromising sense of optimism’ and on the evidence of the exhibition they are clearly a resourceful bunch, using whatever comes to hand as material or context for their continued practice. But despite this, there remained a lingering melancholia suggesting more mixed emotions. One work employed found promotional flyers as the ground upon which to paint, but transformed these contemporary artefacts into something curiously antique. Elsewhere a bag had been constructed from envelopes the artist has received through the post: despite the enterprising approach, I surely couldn’t have been alone in this work prompting a recollection of all the project proposals one writes when just out of university, and which return unwanted, thudding rejection through the letterbox? A similarly downbeat effect was at work in the piece All my ideas sound better on paper, though here it was the opposite reality: the dawning sense that the marvellous conceptual idea never quite emerges into the world as one hopes.

The show’s curatorial premise was never to present a uniform idea, but to allow this group to exist in its diversity. As a result we could see in one handy location many of the pre-eminent concerns of contemporary art practice: an investigation and re-working of the everyday; the knowing artistic reconsideration of Romantic ideals; a concern with folklore, myths and symbols; the concatenation of author, performer and spectator; the experience of expectation, disappointment and failure in making and viewing art… But despite the variety of approaches, practices and media, it seems that ultimately a coherent theme does emerge from the exhibition: Sixes and Sevens gave a clear view of what it means to be emerging artists in the second decade of the twenty-first century, burdened by financial difficulty, weighed down by art history and existing outside the UK art capital, but nonetheless still full of creative and critical ambition, and very determined to use collective strength to invent their own opportunities.

Joanne Lee is a Brighton-based artist and writer whose work explores a curiosity about everyday things. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. http://web.mac.com/generalistjo