Tag Archives: music

WASPS Artists’ Studios Visit: Louise Fraser, Jenny Pope and Carrie Fertig

25 May 2017

This month, we will be visiting three artists who each have a studio at WASPS on Albion Road. Artists include Louise Fraser, Jenny Pope and Carrie Fertig.

Louise Fraser’s practice incorporates drawing, printmaking and sculpture and is a response to the environment she inhabits. Her work draws people’s attention to the space they are in, the space they consume and the space they leave their imprint on.

Jenny Pope creates sculptural pieces inspired by beach-combing, collecting, bone structures and geology working with a range of materials including porcelain, limecrete and found materials. Through her work she explores the changes that happen in our internal lives and externally in the natural environment. Recently, Jenny has been working within a hospital, creating large drawings and wearable sculptures which explore personal space.

Carrie Fertig uses borosilicate glass as the main material in her practice of performance, film, installation, sound and sculpture. From the 20 May-2 July 2017, she will be exhibiting as part of Summa at the Royal Scottish Academy with an installation, sound and performance based on the physical, social and metaphysical events of death. The work she will be showing us concentrates on sound, including work from her group Torcher Chamber Arkestra, which features live music, fire, and digital manipulation of sound on glass instruments that she designs, makes, and repurposes.

This is a great opportunity to meet artists living and working in Edinburgh and to find out more about their working methods and approaches to their art-making

Martin Creed – Down Over Up

30 September 2010 at 6pm

This month, we will be discussing Martin Creed’s major exhibition of new work, Down Over Up. One of Britain’s most highly-regarded and popular artists, he is known for installations such as his 2001 Turner Prize work, No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off and in 2008, No. 850, in which volunteer runners sprinted across the Tate Britain gallery every 30 seconds.

Renowned for his straightforward approach to making art and his deft economy of means, Creed has produced sculptures, installations, drawings, films, performances, music and text, each of which has found its inspiration in the objects and activities of everyday life. Always in search of the essential nature of things, Creed uses the simplest materials to create a world in which reality appears transformed by conceptual rules, as well as by the unexpected breaking of those rules.

‘I want to make things. Im not sure why, but I think its got something to do with other people. I think I want to try to communicate with other people, because I want to say “hello”, because I want to express myself, and because I want to be loved.’ Martin Creed.

Today your love, tomorrow the world

16 May 2007 at 6.30pm

For the next SPIN:Glasgow event, we will be visiting Lowsalt, a Glasgow-based, artist-led, not for profit organisation.

Still in its infancy, the organisation was set up in early 2006 with a fundamental focus on creativity and experimentation. Lowsalt aims to promote and facilitate emerging and established artists across a broad range of disciplines, and provides opportunities for artists to produce and exhibit their work within a free and professional environment. Lowsalt does not have a permanent space within the city, and has recently moved to these premises after having successfully exhibited work across the city in a disused shop front in the Saltmarket.

Lowsalt was established, and is run by, practising artists Kristy Schindler and Rebecca Anson-Armstrong, who act as programming and curatorial facilitators. Krisdy Schindler will be joining us to talk about the organisation and the exhibition.

Today your love, tomorrow the world is an exhibition of new work by four artists from around the world who are now based in Glasgow: Benjamin Merris, Hrafnhildur Hallsdottir, Alhena Katsof and Baldvin Ringsted. Loosely inspired by the Ramones song title, the exhibition comprises work that combines visions of post-rock melancholy with the bitter irony of songs of yore, featuring video, collage and drawing.

BENJAMIN MERRIS is an American artist living and working in Glasgow. Ben studied at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and moonlighted as a professional monster wrestler for three years. Romantic, unshakable childhood visions and the Glasgow School of Art MFA Course brought him to a new home. In the past year, he has exhibited and performed at intermedia in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and at CAFA in Beijing.

HRAFNHILDUR HALLSDOTTIR’s work strategically uses and abuses everyday materials. Her affinities lie with the stuff that others discard or disdain – cardboard, thread, string, cheap felt-tip pens and garishly coloured feathers. The many references to music, especially rock music, emphasises the artists desire to lose her self, and us, within the sonic architecture of a thunderous riff designed to obliterate rational thought and collapse the boundaries between art and life.

ALHENA KATSOF was born in Montreal, Canada. Alhena moved to Glasgow in 2005 to do an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. Alhena’s practice is directly informed by the conceptual and aesthetic sensibilities of collage, which are pertinent both in their visual quality and sociological implications. Embedded within her work is a fractured storytelling and an intimate, melancholic humour. Although not overtly feminist, Alhena’s work is indebted to a feminist dialogue and to all of the confusion and opportunity that it provides. Alhena has exhibited her work in Canada and the US, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Beijing. Alhena has made a new video entitled For Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World.

BALDVIN RINGSTED exploits familiar or historically important found sounds and events in his work. His installations have included sculptures, sound, video, found objects, paintings and written manuscripts. Born in Akureyri in Iceland, he now lives and works in Glasgow. Ringsteds background is in music. He studied jazz theory and also worked as a rock and experimental musician. Baldvin has had several solo shows and taken part in group shows and projects in as diverse places as Finland and New York.

Pass the Time of Day

21 April 2005 at 6pm

Pass the Time of Day is curated by artist Paul Rooney, and is a collaborative project realised with Gasworks in London, Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham and the Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, as well as the Collective Gallery.

With two preoccupations – music and the everyday – Paul Rooney has assembled a compelling mix of video and slide works by Rosalind Nashashibi, Pipilotti Rist and others. Capturing life as it passes by on photo, video and film, the artists have presented this familiar visual imagery set to thumping, soaring, cheesy or elegiac soundtracks to great effect. The more you watch, the more you are struck by the weirdness and heroism of the everyday.

Artist Billy McCall will join us to talk about the show, and discuss video art more generally. As well as exhibiting in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Japan, Billy was responsible for the Tagteam experiment from 2002 to 2004 – a brilliant notion whereby each exhibiting artist nominated the next artist to show in a room in Billy’s house. Billy also does the graphic design for the Collective Gallery and is a major music fan which makes him the perfect guide for our event.