Darling They've Found The Body - Katie Jane Garside

Images from an exhibition by Katie Jane Garside at Woom, The Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham







































































































































































































Katie Jane Garside

And 10 hours earlier there’d been spiders

Image: Unknown

The sun streams in through a gap in the curtains

I’m momentarily blinded and cannot see her face

Only an outline, indeterminate

The story continues, but I’ve lost the thread

And am content to listen,

Letting the words soak in, scrambled

Photo Story #1

Reporting from the hard front

Dreams I may have had #2

7th May 2007


Image: Boyle family projection

I was in a large spacious flat. It belonged to a guy I work with. There were throngs of decorators, interior designers doing up the place. Large blow up structures made of rubber and filled with air started to fill up the place. I delved underneath one, someone had a machine that blew up balloons super quick. They weren’t ordinary balloons, complicated structures comprising of different coloured shapes were created and flew off. I was impressed by them. There was a large raised play area on one side of the room, my companion and I bounced around on it, looking down on the ground, it seemed far below. Again the structure seemed complicated, slightly unfathomable.

We moved on, entering a fair arcade. There were cushioned seats on one side of a room, a variety of people including an older woman sat there and surveyed a selection of machines on the other side of the room. One of them was glass fronted and was made up of a variety of penises (real) entering cushioned rubber/plastic in simulating sex. It was vaguely educational ‘Oh, that’s how it happens’. There was the ability to select other phenomena using a touch computer screen that was alphabetical. We went to v for ‘vagina’ there was no entry. I suggested w for ‘womb’. On another screen was shown a video of a Russian red haired woman in a Space suit listlessly smoking a cigarette. She looked bored. She was speaking but I could not understand, it being in Russian. Subtitles were displayed on the bottom of the screen. She was then folded into a machine that looked like a spaceship.

Another area of the Arcade, lots of machines everywhere, a dingy room, low ceilinged the boundaries unclear due to their being shrouded in cloth. The machines were monsters, robots, in turn trying to consume us inside of them. One with thick tentacles, another with an exposed rib cage. Finally we exit and sit down to recover. ‘Phew, that was hard work!’

This Is For You - An Exhibition at Studio4, Birmingham

I am presently part of an art show of collaborations between Paul Roberts, or Monsters Monsters, and over 50 international artists. The exhibition runs from the 13th to the 24th August. See below for pictures. His monsters are fab.











www.studio4gallery.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/monstersmonsters

Shadow bright - An Exhibition

The Shadow, An Exhibition at Compton Verney

Image: Marvin E. Newman, Untitled

Shadows are never owned. They are ascribed; fleeting moments of belonging to someone/something in a combination never to be repeated and almost certainly to be ignored. Their associations are manifold, signs of malevolence, foreboding, a representation of the inner psyche, of dreams and desires. Tear the shadow from the person and the spirit is sick or worse still, absent, like Bart Simpson hissing in the dark when he sells his soul to Milhouse.

And so we wonder into the dark subdued tones of the first room of the exhibition at Compton Verney. There are faint shadows on the wall, flickering, changing, hard to decipher. On closer inspection their sources are tiny metal skeletons, reminiscent of Mexico’s day of the dead. But either the room isn’t dark enough or the candles aren’t bright enough; the effect is underwhelming. It’s not a patch on Ray Harryhausen.

However, no matter as it’s time to move on and things improve instantly.

Image: Fiona Tan, Downside Up, 2002, Video

Next room is taken up with a large scale video projection of a starkly black and white road scene, by Fiona Tan. What immediately becomes apparent is all is not what it seems, for the camera is focussed on the shadows not the people. Some make immediate sense to the eye, others, I’m never quite sure who or what they belong to so distorted is the angle. It’s disorientating, mesmerising you find yourself following the individual paths of people, but shorn of unnecessary detail, reduced to shape with purpose, with a rhythm of it’s own.

Image: Tracey Moffat, Laudanum #13 1999

Tracey Moffat. I have never come across that name before. But instantly, in the next room, I feel like I should have done. It’s all that I’ve ever wanted in a photograph; several photographs. It’s the Laudanum series. She is the killer combination, the distillation of my aesthetic world. A top trump. The shades of grey give the feeling of a bygone era, I find out they are no ordinary photographs, produced using the photogravure process onto paper.

A photogravure

A photogravure is a photographic image produced from an engraving plate. The process is rarely used today due to the costs involved, but it produces prints which have the subtlety of a photograph and the art quality of a lithograph.

Source: http://www.curtis-collection.com/process.html

There is a strong allusion to German expressionist cinema, in the distortion of the shot, in the melodramatic gestures reflected in certain photographs, even in the staging of the scenes. A loose narrative unfolds but only in closer inspection on the internet, a problem in the gallery being the poor hang. The top prints are hung too high on the wall, a problem I encountered in an earlier exhibition at Compton Verney, Only Make Believe, and something they really need to address. There is no shortage of space in the building, however exhibition rooms are small and distance cannot be achieved to view some of the exhibits satisfactorily.

Back to the narrative; a mistress and her bare chested servant appear in various stages of madness, in laudanum induced ecstasy, whereby they cut hair, prostrate themselves, watch each other. There is a strong feeling of voyeurism, peeping through keyholes and windows, drawn into this melodrama of increasing freedom in madness. It reminds me of the dirty glamour of that legendary mother and daughter (their names escape me), society beauties, who deteriorated into madness.

Image: Laurie Anderson, At the Shrink's, 1975-1997

Laurie Anderson reached number two in the British charts in 1980 with her record ‘O Superman’. She can currently be seen in the corner of a room in Compton Verney, approximately 10 centimetres tall, sat talking to her shrink. It’s unnerving.

Image: Gary Hill, I Believe it is an Image in Light of the Other, 1991-92

The next room.

Initial total disorientation. The room is so dark, faint shapes can be made out on the floor, and I stumble and kick a book at one stage, but I’m not sure what it is and what it means. Slowly my eyes accustom to the dark (dull memories of my psychology days make me think; how long does this take? 10/20 minutes?). I begin to see the projections on the books, arranged so as to allude to the pages turning, to mouths moving intimately over the surface of words. I Believe it is an Image in Light of the Other by Gary Hill. It’s like seeing words for the first time without context, initial meaning. I stumble over books again. And this time it’s because there is an indecipherable urge to get closer, to get drawn into the images displayed on the surfaces they are so alluring, erotic.

What stays the same, what changes when an image is reproduced on the 2d plane? This is what Ceal Floyer neatly explores with a projector and a wall. It really is very clever, though a bit dry, the ladies I shared the room with at the time of studying really were very impressed.

Image: Annie Ratti, Shadow, 1996, Video

Annie Ratti’s large scale projection of a doorway, a room reminiscent of Hammer horror, of Powell and Pressburger, sees the shadow sheering form the body in an act of defiance. In becoming a separate entity it walks the earth a phantom, a doppleganger. This is an example of successful curating, the video is projected at the bottom of a set of stairs, one with a gradual slope, giving a long range view. The viewer is forced to walk towards the moving image, being at once a part of, and separate from the image, in much the same way as the shadow.

We walk through a darkened room full of a projection of crabs on the beach. I stop and stare for a moment. Let’s forget about it, it’s not very interesting, let’s move on.

We come to the opening of a small black room. It instantly brings a smile to the face for inside there is a lantern casting bright images on the wall at lightning speeds. I gingerly step in and it is glorious, total submersion in a world of light, speed and childhood. Centrally is the device, an Arabic lamp, ‘Misbah’ an instrument for light.

Image: Doug Aitken, Lighttrain, 2005, 5 channel video installation

And then the last room. It’s long, a cross of video screens displayed at the end of the room, quite a distance away. We sit and watch. The colours are beautiful, the rhythm in which images come and go from the five screens is undeniably clever, it’s glossy, high paced, Hollywood. And yet there is an absence of figures, we follow the shadows instead through sun and neon. It’s erotic, dazzling. But ultimately a mystery.

Andy Warhol’s shadow greats us as we move out. Appalling place for it but no matter, my head’s still reeling from Tracey, from Gary’s books, and the lantern that let you into the inner sanctum.

Dreams I may have had #1

Russian poster, artist unknown

1st May 2007

It was a ceremony to bring in the new. There was a father figure leading it all. People were stood on two sides of a deep body of water.

A girl in turn had to dive into the water and come out the other side to represent a decade. The first two girls did it, their path flashed bright (blue and pink) after diving in. The third girl I was having an affair with, I was mumbling encouragement as she dived (initially I thought it would be me, I was relieved when it wasn’t). She was ages in the water but eventually she made it. But she hadn’t succeeded, the king read out from a list of offences to ask which she had committed. She was guilty and banished, to spend her life as an insect, with someone to look after her (a shapeshifter)

I was sad as we would be separated. I went to visit her, she was happy, we walked past the place we used to live, there was a strong feeling of sentiment, reminiscence for things lost. She was flying around an abandoned house having fun.