Art Stalking

The Event is upon us and we'll be spending the next 5 days changing our name every 6 hours, wearing hand decorated dungarees, playing thought-stopping games, eating brightly coloured food, asking questions, strengthening our Dantien, collective dreaming, strumming red, yellow, green and blue ukuleles, finding portals, calling rainbows, going to the top, chanting punk meditation, making friends, sleeping in pods, giving out flowers, love-bombing, and having all the fun we can cram into the day.

Want to join us?

http://family.404corporate.net/

Come along to the Gallery of Owls' Zine Event at the Sunflower Lounge on Thursday 15th Oct from 8pm. As well as performances from Pseudo Nippon, Fallen Timbers, and the genius Richard Peel, Stuart and I will make a rare and exciting Milgram appearance, DJing cold head games, and hot perverted beats. We've also put in zine-style reprints of a.a.s. maga-zine and comics from 2003-2009



All You Can Eat Zine on Gallery of Owls

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While you're here, I do hope you're following The Family's blog - fun times ahead in November, and a spooky Vision Quest next week.

You may have noticed that there hasn't been much activity on this blog recently, there are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that I've been working on expanding the remit of Art Stalking to incorporate the review site I also run, and bring in some other writers as well.

I'll post more information when that's up and running, and if you're interested in getting involved let me know.

I haven't been blogging much recently, partly because there hasn't been so much going on, but also due to my PhD and art practice getting in the way, but if you're missing the art commentary, you should head over to Steve Varndell's new blog where he talks about all sorts of interesting stuff, including Rollerderby, socks and art shows, such as Treasure Seekers VIII (Caitlin Griffiths show curated by Charlie Levine and Kate Pennington-Wilson):

"These images are highly stylised, informed by the classical and elegant handwriting commonly used all those years ago. They compliment the stories by developing the work of the minute takers slightly away from their words and into the aesthetic. I can't help but wish the minute takers had done more doodling in the margins. There is a link in the way the forms have been isolated and diplayed as single entities, to the more classical Japanese painters and calligraphers motto of less is more elegant."

from svarndell.blogspot.com

If you don't know him, Steve is an artist and curator, who is part of Crowd 6:
www.svarndell.co.uk
www.crowd6.org.uk

Met up with Parfyme again (We'd been in their Tent Show, and Pelle was part of Red Line Surveillance - building the mini bus shelter that's still there). They've been doing a Residency in Loughborough for Radar.

They travelled around the campus and further afield, getting "Ideas" in a custom made rucksack/mailbox - they were deliberately vague about what this meant, but when pressed said that perhaps something to do with public spaces would be good. They then took some of these ideas for activities on their current residency, and they may also feed into future work However, there was also an interesting suggestion that what they were really doing was to encourage people from a particular place to discuss what they thought would benefit them and if some people agreed, give them a push toward working on it together. Rather than being there to "fix" things, they were a kind of catalyst that could activate an area and encourage further public engagement.



This is from a set of photos up on Flickr of them exchanging Danish Sausage for ideas.

They came over to Birmingham for a couple of days, braving the snow to gather ideas around the Ikon, Brindleyplace and Digbeth, I didn't manage to see any of the things people suggested, but think it's a really good thing to just ask people to consider their environment in a different way, to change the course of someone's working routine, their train of thought. Whether any of the specific ideas get implemented is not the point for me, but instead that we start to realise we can work together to improve public spaces, and always be coming up with new ideas.



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Parfyme website

I've noticed that drawing seems to be getting more popular recently around here, of course there's always been plenty of great illustrators, and one of Birmingham's best artists - Paul Newman - has always had drawing as an important part of his practice. I'm thinking more of people who had stopped doing much drawing taking it up again, or people starting who had never really done much.

I used to draw all the time, but it was more a way of getting my visual ideas out than an end in itself, like storyboarding or illustrating narratives that I was constructing. I even used to create my own comics, but found it a bit frustrating as I wanted to interact with characters not control them (this is probably where my current practice came from).   Doing One Day Comic with Henrik Schrat helped me to see drawing as an action, as a process that could be collaborative, and since then I've been getting back into it.

I used to draw in a very painstaking way, often taking a day to do a panel of a comic, or longer if I was doing an illustration for a magazine, but when you're doing something in a short timeframe, with other people, this has to go out of the window. Sure, not all the results will be brilliant, but the drawing becomes more of a document of something that happened between people than a polished product, and to me that's more interesting. (No, I'm not just trying to excuse my dodgy skills!)

Trying to explore this, over New Year's Eve (9pm - 2am) a group of us made a comic together: it was open to anyone we'd met out and talked to about it, but ended up mostly people from Owls and a.a.s. with Jerome from B.I.F.S.. We chatted about a starting point, and settled on doing something about Pookahs, as we've been working with this idea for a while, with performances and videos based on them. Someone suggested we use the Surrealist exquisite corpse technique to generate ideas, then we each did two or three pages to make a crazy disjointed beast, that I think gives a flavour of the themes and process really well.  We'll be selling photocopied versions, as I think full colour ones might be too pricey, but could make this available as pdf or special technicolour edition if anyone's interested.

I also went along to Dr Sketchy's Burlesque life-drawing class on Saturday, after Graphiquillian made it sound interesting. I was a bit nervous, and gulping cider to offset this probably didn't help my drawing skills, but had a great time overall. The speed of the poses really pushed me to work in a different way, and I was surprised by how a lot of my drawings came out - not perfect certainly, but perhaps a bit more energetic than stuff I've done in the past.


I'd like to experiment a bit more with how I do things next time, maybe even try, gulp, colour!

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Liz Walker's photos from Dr Sketchy's Brum

Alex Hughes' Dr Sketchy's Post

Graphiquillian's Dr Sketchy's Post

Candice Smith's Dr Sketchy's Post

Works by Henrik Schrat (with guests) & Shezad Dawood form an installation at ESP that feels very different from the opening exhibition there.  It may be a happy accident that the artists were scheduled together, but the works complement each other well.  Although many dismiss comics and cowboy films as sidelined genres, here they are stretched and mutated into exciting new forms.

For One Day Comic, Schrat worked with others (including myself) to create each comic in just a day.  It was daunting, and seemed impossible at first, but with plenty of coffee and Henrik's enthusiasm, somehow it all came together.  The final results might not make much sense, but it is the process that's fascinating - it showed you how much you could achieve when you put your mind to it and when you had a tight deadline.

In Feature: Architecture, Dawood has made a film with participants including a Christian historical re-enactment society, Gay Leather bartenders, opera singers and an avant-garde art band (The Lonesome Cowboys from Hell) - I'm not sure I followed what was going on but there was something to do with a massive bar fight, a cross between Billy the Kid and Krishna, and zombie flesh-eaters. My kind of night out.

There's also some extracts from the comics on Henrik Schrat's website

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Feature: Architecture by Shezad Dawood
&
One-Day-Comic by Henrik Schrat
With special guests a.a.s, Access Local, Asia Alfasi, Simon & Tom Bloor, Celine Condorelli, Hans Christian Dany, Shezad Dawood, Stefan Heidenreich, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, Plastique Fantastique, Olav Westphalen

open 6 December 2008 to 31 January 2009, Thursday - Saturday 12-5pm 

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, B9 4AR, UK
eastsideprojects.org