Thursday 29 September, 8pm – Invisible Alan & Dominic Hislop

Artists: J.G. Ballard, Patrick Chapman, Invisible Alan & Dominic Hislop, economicthoughtprojects, Mark V Rossi, Henderson Six

Exhibition runs until October 29th

After the very successful opening presentation of video and sound by economicthoughprojects, the second event of Timecoloured Place presents Invisible Alan and Dominic Hislop. In line with Ballard’s Prima Belladonna, the work is a reflection of experimentation and the careful culturing of modern technology to produce a call and refrain in music and video that appeals to ancient instincts. Alan and Hislop work through a process of pure trial and error with technology which offers a vast playground of possible directions to create sound and visuals, respectively. The call in this pairing is the EP, entitled ‘Chubby Little Nerd’, which will be released by Invisible Alan on the evening. Hislop’s videos are a response or refrain to this musical call. The music has been produced with samplers and sequencers and varies from melodic melancholy to what one BBC 6 music producer described as “wonky and wrong”! Dominic’s videos are a rummage through the already huge mound of debris of modern computer and social technology and feature mannequins, first generation video games and abandoned shop fronts and shopping malls.

Alan and Hislop will perform some of the music live on the evening and will present the videos and music in parallel. Also, Patrick Chapman will read his new poems from the book published for Timecoloured Place.

The book, which forms part of this exhibition, contains a story and poetry. The story is ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956), the first short story J.G. Ballard published. The poetry includes a poem entitled ‘Background Radiation’, a newly commissioned piece by Patrick Chapman. From The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, the story presents a futuristic world that deals with familiar psychological states: fear, obsession and anxiety, alongside the unfamiliar, exotic technology employed – in this case, ‘chloro-flora’. Chapman’s poem, written in 2011, responds to Ballard’s themes across more than half a century. It will appear in his next collection, A Promiscuity of Spines: New and Selected Poems, expected in 2012 from Salmon.

Invisible Alan is the bedroom DJ project of Irish musician, Eoin Young, who lives in Budapest and still makes music with Villa R and previously did with bands like The Deportees and I am the Waltons. Invisible Alan composed music in 2011 for a previous show curated by Oonagh Young and exhibited in St. Patricks Universtiy Hospital called ‘Spears of Daylight’. Much of the music on the ‘Chubby Little Nerd’ EP has been played and selected for the weekly podcast on the BBC 6music Introducing show with Tom Robinson.

Dominic Hislop studied art at colleges in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Baltimore. He has lived in various cities making a number of site-specific street interventions and initiating Big Hope, a collaborative project group (www.bighope.hu) creating participative projects that aimed to investigate social issues pertinent to a variety of local contexts in which they were to be exhibited (e.g. urban demographic shifts, alternative economies, immigration), and employed dialogue and creative participation by ‘non-artists’ as part of the project’s process. Hislop’s recent solo output maintains an interest in social and political issues through works that take a turn towards more personal reflections, often incorporating his own photography and references from his interest in music and popular culture.

Individual and group works have been exhibited in 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), Caracas // 2007 at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen // 2006 Apexart, New York // 2005 Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel // 2004 Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Goethe Institute, Budapest; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin // 2003 SparwasserHQ, Berlin // 2002 Torino Bieniale of Young Art, Turin // 1999 Moderna Museum, Stockholm; Tramway, Glasgow.

Patrick Chapman’s work has appeared in anthologies and publications around the world, translated into several languages. His books include the poetry collections Jazztown (Raven Arts Press, Dublin, 1991), The New Pornography (Salmon, Co. Clare, 1996), Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights (Salmon, 2007) A Shopping Mall on Mars (BlazeVOX, N.Y., 2008) and The Darwin Vampires (Salmon, 2010). His collection of short stories is The Wow Signal (Bluechrome, Bristol, 2007).

Because of our preconceived ideas or expectations, no place can be experienced objectively. Every place holds associations – physical, historical, mythical and emotional – imagined or otherwise. Everywhere we go we expect to encounter certain ideas, conversations; a particular linguistic infrastructure and aesthetic system.

Places where we encounter visual art, literature or music hold similar attachments and are conditional on fulfilling a pre-existing set of circumstances associated with audience interaction, communication and accessibility. ‘We live in frameworks and are surrounded by frames of references,’ [1] claimed Robert Smithson. In order to develop a post-industrial concept of place, he developed the concepts of dislocation and displacement as a method of site-specific art.

A walk down a street today, with its numerous signs and advertisements selling new desires and alternative worlds, provokes and deepens this sense of dislocation, according to J.G.Ballard, who observed that ‘reality has become a mass of competing fictions.’[2] Our own realities have become the responsibility of the imagination.

So, what if we are to play with expected ‘codes of practice’? What happens when art or literature is placed in unexpected sites? What if our presence in a particular space at a particular time creates the artwork we are viewing? What if this work is accessible globally, every 10 minutes? How much does the site itself, as the place where we encounter artworks, affect the meaning of the work? How does it affect our direct experience, or the memory of the work?

Timecoloured Place is an attempt to play with the inherent uncertainties of the ‘site-specific’, bringing together science fiction from the 1950’s, contemporary poetry, live soundscapes created in real time and accessible anywhere, new sound works based on old recordings and visuals, which use technology to create, reinvent or breakdown.

The exhibition consists of artworks installed in the gallery by Henderson Six, a small book available with the work of J.G.Ballard and Patrick Chapman and three evening events will take place over the duration of the exhibition. A turntable is also nstalled in the gallery which plays the special edition (1/5) vinyl record pressed for the opening night by economicthoughtprojects with newly commissioned works from ETP, Machinefabreik, The Plumber Anders Quatret and Music for One.

Henderson Six develops custom software designed to be unpredictable and dynamic. The software acts as a provocative interface that encourages the viewer to re-experience a familiar act or phenomenon. ‘Radius Music’ directly explores musical composition and performance, collapsing both processes into a simultaneous and real-time action. The unpredictability comes from the interactions of visitors to the gallery who, intentionally or not, influence the sounds and subsequent visuals of the performance, simply by being in the same physical space.

Russell Hart of economicthoughtprojects presented, on the opening night, ‘The O’Sullivan Versions,’ a series of four newly commissioned sound works in response to a 1951 recording of an Irish Ballad. A number of short video works followed, including ‘The Amen Break’ by Nate Harrison, ‘Tape Reconstruction for Nixon and Haldeman’ by Allan Hughes and ‘MisinforMation’ by Mordant Music and BFI.

The final event on October 7^th will show Mark V Rossi performing a series of works made from a network of audio signals and random processes using field recordings, old vinyl, found sound objects and real and virtual instruments, playing with notions of place, resemblance, intention and gesture.

Timecoloured Place brings together disparate practices that resonate on a collective level in order to destabilise your expectations or preconceived ideas and might even take you by surprise. But then again, maybe you knew that already.

Oonagh Young Gallery acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council in making this exhibition possible.

We would like to thank the Ballard Estate for permission to print ‘Prima Belladonna’ from The Complete Short Stories

[1] Rober Smithson, in Nancy Holt, ed.,The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York; New York University Press, 1979)

[2] J.G.Ballard, South Bank Show, ITV, London, Sept 17th, 2006. Television