Jim Colquhoun (artist) – performance reading and Oliver Rees (writer) – talk/lecture

Transmission gallery present the work of two artists whose practices invite scrutiny of the manner in which aesthetic value is contingent upon cultural perspectives. Having both lived between the United States and Iran and Japan respectively the work of Kamrooz Aram and Takahiko Iimura questions the privileged view of culture as it is taken in by the Western gaze armed with an self-awareness of the problems inherent in issues of identity politics.

Kamrooz Aram’s paintings often speak with the simultaneous vocabularies of the emanating angels of the Christian renaissance, Iranian political poster art, Islamic tessellation and 8-bit computer game graphics. That the Nintendo Entertainment System should infuse a practice concerned with how image and icon are assembled in the art of the West and Islamic Middle East is fully in keeping with Aram’s examination of how the contemporary artist makes sense of ‘the Other’. His paintings are incisive studies of the complexity inherent in viewing the East from the West and vice versa, with any suggestion of didactic polarisation disrupted by the permeation of one geographic eye line into the other and high culture into low. Experiments in composition, saturated palate and use of iconography accentuate the instability and potential rawness of cultural borrowings and jarring comparisons. There is invitation to trace codes and patterns but with attempts at decryption met with a deeper enmeshing in cultural signifiers and confrontation with the unforgiving nature of reinforced stereotypes.

In contrast Takahiko Iimura’s film MA (intervals) is a very direct attempt to examine an aesthetic notion rooted in a particular culture. Existing between the worlds of the New York avant-garde and the experimental art underground of his native Tokyo Iimura experienced a detachment from his cultural roots. This division provoked his investigation of the Japanese concept of ma, a notion which conflates spacial arrangement and time to focus of intervals and negative space between objects rather than viewing them in isolation. Confessing that he found the idea difficult to grasp, in his endeavours to understand it he began to find parallels in Henri Bergson’s discussion of duration as a fundamental tool in experiencing the world and imagined its application to filmmaking. The pithy minimalism of MA (intervals) exists between complete abstract film and experimental movie using only black film, which blocks light, and transparent film as its basic materials.

Transmission would like to thank Wilkinson Gallery, Keir McGuiness, Michael King and Fiona King.

Artists talk in the gallery

Aileen Campbell

Aileen Campbell presents new video works in which two "sound dreamers" escape from themselves, until their performance slips away.

The artist uses structures of music-making to elicit feelings of empathy, sensation, event, nostalgia and illusion which buffer or distract the viewer from social conventions of judgement.

During absence, daydream or trance, the voice and ear can begin to transcend the physical and local and an alternate time experience becomes possible. These male 'sound dreamers' become sites for new aesthetic experiences formed the projected voice.

In the confused cacophony of private sounds in a domestic space, a sound performance ensues. These conflicting sounds with their disruptive metaphors begin a series of flawed relationships and associations between the performer, the resonating room and the event.

Ultimately, however, out of this dissonance the private experience becomes a public. The musical structure codifies the performance but the private site of 'pre-performance' remains untouched. The sounds from the head are presented publicly but the sound takes with it an individual corporality.

Performance of Duets and Duels to coincide with the publication launch of Starform, the catalogue for Aileen Campbell's exhibition at the gallery.

Member's Show

AND THE HE LIKES THE ME

 TRANSMISSION GALLERY ANNUAL MEMBERS SHOW

Preview: Saturday 7 JULY 7.00–9.00pm

Exhibition open: Tuesday 10 July – Saturday 28 July 2007, 11am–5pm

@ Poloc Cricket Club

 In Skylar Haskard’s sculptures and installations there is a suggestion of an elaborate and possibly continual process of making. Temporal constructions borrow form from shantytown architecture or the products of youthful den making. Vivid detritus is littered about raw assemblages, engergising a space for potential actions or traces of a human body.  Here, in a tacit invitation for interactivity, there is the sense of an ineffable quest for alternative methods to approach the day to day via inventive reappropriations of theory, emblems and logotypes.

For his exhibition at Transmission Skylar will develop a body of new work in situ in response to the space and gallery site.

Skylar Haskard (b. 1977 Los Angeles) received a BA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2001 and an MFA from UCLA in 2003. Recent exhibitons include New Work, Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, 5 Habitats, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, Collapsable Monuments, Thrust Projects, New York, Speed, Need, and Greed at Villa Arson in Nice, France, as well as shows at Kunst Pavillion in Innsbruck, Austria, Participant in New York, Magazzino d’arte Moderna, Rome, Italy, MAK Centre in Los Angeles, and Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles.  Skylar Haskard lives and works in Los Angeles.

Anja Kirschner

 “ The mans just admitted it! The flood was engineered as a direct response to ‘unforeseen fluctuations’ – now, he wouldn’t mean their very predictable desire to cleanse the areas adjacent to the city meant callously flushing us out of our homes and neighbourhoods, would he, eh?”

Agitator at a Public Consultation Meeting, Year 20XX

Set in the not-so-distant future POLLY II – part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’ – portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams.

The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors, pirates, and former slaves whom once inhabited East London and fought a daily battle against their subjection to poverty, displacement and judicial terror.

Alluding to Polly (1728) – John Gay’s censored sequel to the popular Beggars Opera (1727), which resurrected the character of the robber, MacHeath in the disguise of the African pirate captain Morano (scheming to take revenge on a colony in the West Indies) – POLLY II is populated by many of the characters made popular by Gay and Brecht. The film features the naïve and incorruptible Polly, the vengeful whore Jenny Diver, and the treacherous and greedy Peachum – fencer, thief catcher and king of the beggars.

Anja Kirschner will be at Transmission Gallery for a special screening of POLLY II followed a Q & A session with Richard Birkett on Saturday 26 May at 3pm. Richard Birkett is an artist and writer based in London. He is co-director of Whitechapel Project Space, and a regular contributor to Untitled magazine. He is involved in several curatorial projects including forthcoming event La Commune at the Serpentine Gallery, and Asia Europe Mediations opening in July in Poznan, Poland. This event is free. All Welcome

Anja Kirschner is an artist filmmaker based in London who studied at Slade School of Fine Art, London, and also at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She was the winner of the Becks Futures Student Film and Video Prize in 2002, and has exhibited internationally in film festivals and galleries.

Transmission Gallery would like to thank Whitechapel Project Space

Transmission Gallery is supported by the Scottish Arts Council & Glasgow City Council

London Filmmaker Co-Op and LUX

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A screening of work from the London Filmmaker Co-operative with an introductory talk by the programme’s curator Mark Webber. An opportunity to view two programmes of key experimental British film from the 60s and 70s on 16mm.

Inspired by the growth of underground film in the United States The LFC pioneered a hands-on, expanded approach to filmmaking which 

Including films by Annabel Nicolson, Guy Sherwin, Mike Leggett, David Crosswaite, 
Lis Rhodes, 
Chris Garratt, Mike Dunford, 
Marilyn Halford, Malcolm Le Grice, Chris Welsby, 
Peter Gidal, 
Stephen Dwoskin, 
Gill Eatherley, 
William Raban, John Smith.

USAISAMONSTER is a demented psych/prog/folk/noise nonsense from Rhode Island (but now they live in Bedford Stuyvesant) on LOAD RECORDS!! I saw them play in May in this venue called the Glasshouse. It was the venue’s last ever gig and there was this total party atmosphere. I had to run ten blocks to meet my friend but she didn’t show up because this gang had beaten up her friend as part of an initiation ritual. I ran back and watched the band play between these two huge mountains of rubbish and debris.

www.myspace.com/usaisamonster

GERMLIN is 50% of GAY AGAINST YOU and a musician in his own right. This is what someone wrote, “GERMLIN produces a hyperactive mix of gabba, chipcore, lo-fi & power pop, combining influences like VAN HALEN, VENETIAN SNARES and DAT POLITICS.” Wow.

www.myspace.com/germlin

HOUSEHOLD is an edgy, rockin’ rock act from Glasgow.

www.myspace.com/inthehousehold 

Rob Kennedy

in Project Space

Group Exhibition

MONIKA GRZYMALA ANDREAS HOFER BRIAN JUNGEN ROBERT LONGO DORIT MARGREITER SCOTT MYLES ROSHA YAGHMAI

Hot Rock is a group show in a space converted specifically to bring together the disparate practices of seven international artists.

From the uncertain vantage point of the first decade of the 21^st Century many artists who matured from the apparent security of the 1990s seek and assemble fragments of culture that will provide tools to scrutinise the world. In Hot Rock these fragments come together as raw matter and disposable consumer products provoking projections for the future and new methods for deciphering the world as it is today. Primitivism and slacker culture entwine with the slick production of mass markets while the economy of information and image are questioned in an age of rampant urbanism and civic sprawl.

As cities change Dorit Margreiter’s video The World May Not Be Deep But it is Definitely Shallow and Wide considers how they might be documented a hundred years from now while Robert Longo’s charcoal drawings imagine bleak, apocalyptic visions borrowed from mass media. Scott Myles and Brian Jungen modify and reinterpret the cultures that surround consumption, from art markets to Nike trainers and baseball bats. Gaudy reliefs from patchworked wetsuit fragments and knowing daubs of robots and superheros become wry musing on youth and lifestyle for Rosha Yaghmai and Andreas Hofer. Monika Grzymala’s spacial drawing will respond to physical parameters of gallery, affected directly by the other artworks.

This exhibition aims to invite a natural interplay between the included works, encouraging interactions that allow individual pieces to function collectively on both a cognitive and physical level.

Transmission Gallery would like to thank Gallery Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, Gallery Krobath Wimmer, Vienna, Metro Pictures, New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York,  and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.