Road for the Future
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Road for the Future
December 2024
Artists’ Biographies
Adam Chodzko lives and works in Whitstable, Kent. His art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm, his work investigates and invents the possibilities of collective imagination through using a poetics of everyday life. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in the UK (Tate St Ives 2008), Europe and the US, and has work in international public and private collections. www.adamchodzko.com
Anna Lucas is a London based artist film-maker. She makes work that develops observations of social networks and group dynamics in response to specific geographic and architectural locations. In 2008, she was Artist in Residence at The Oxford University Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics where she connected blindness, drawing and neuroscience through a series of events called ‘Land of Silence and Darkness’. Her films have been screened in the UK, Germany and US, and she has had a number of solo shows in the UK and Australia. Her work is distributed by LUX.
Judith Dean is a reactive artist who responds to whatever context she finds herself in, using a wide range of materials and methodologies including sculpture, installation, video and performance. Since winning the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2005 Judith has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has held solo exhibitions at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2006), and at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere (2006). In 2006 she also exhibited in the Whitstable Biennale, and most recently at The Poetry Society in London. Dean currently teaches sculpture at University of the West of England, Bristol.
Sophie Hope Through her work, she tries to inspect the uncertain relationships between art and society. This involves establishing how to declare her politics through her practice, rethinking what it means to be paid to be critical and devising tactics to challenge notions of authorship. She writes and teaches on subjects such as public art, art and labour, the politics of socially engaged art and curating as critical practice at Birkbeck, University of London, where she works as a lecturer in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. www.sophiehope.org.uk/
Anna Best’s work covers a range of media, publishing books, broadsheets and websites, film and video as well as the ephemeral format of live events. She has made work for public gallery commissions, eg. Tate Modern (1998), The Barbican (2007) and the Photographers’ Gallery (2003), taking place in diverse sites and contexts. She has initiated ambitious projects prior to Road For The Future including “Vauxhall Pleasure” on a local traffic interchange in London. She has maintained a part time teaching practice at a range of institutions including Goldsmiths College and Brighton University and currently lives in Dorset. www.annabest.info
30/04/2012
Adam Chodzko is making two works which transform Powerstock’s locality into a focus for global fantasies. In the first he has taken a series of short videos taken from the imagined viewpoint of a human or animal lying in wait or seeking refuge. Each video is uploaded onto Piratebay with the description that these are copyright-free videos, recorded on Powerstock Common, available to anyone who wants to use them as cutaways within other films. Thus over time the Common metaphorically lifts above its current location to spread globally as clods of earth and vegetation floating through digital and real space, able to freely enter other narratives.
The second work is a performance evoking another possible future; the vision of an overenthusiastic developer imagining a new branch of his bank opening in the incongruous setting at the centre of the Common. The bank is ‘created’ amongst the trees, simply and pragmatically, in order to indicate a few seconds of corporate video where the audience momentarily become the bank’s architecture, staff and protestors.
30/04/2012
Anna Lucas has made a film within which she observes and portrays three men at work, a deer stalker and squirrel trapper and an activist who utilises road kill skins. Who are they, why are we told so little, unanswered questions evoke a palpable atmosphere and take us to a place outside the verbal. In previous work Lucas has explored social networks and group relationships. This new work departs to focus on the solitary activities the men pursue, their relationship with animals and the land. Their aloneness echoes the fact that pre-oil the land was full of people working, and how at the same time the gentry had themselves painted in empty pastoral scenes, which have fed our notions of how the countryside should look. The almost stealthy quality of the men’s activity in Lucas’s film reiterates and questions this state of affairs. The film will be shown off grid using pedal power with Magnificent Revolution.
30/04/2012
Judith Dean has been working with ideas of territory and claiming, conflating the epic and the everyday, negotiating the omnipresence of cliché.
Faced with working remotely in relation to the Common, Dean resorted to trying to be there when she wasn’t, which immediately meant the Common didn’t have to be what or where it is, and that other places, where neither of them were or ever could be, could intrude.
The farce begins.
The Common becomes Rome, both as a foundation of British history and as a symbol of colonization, with a little persuasion and sometimes with the aid of props. This, in turn, is invaded by footage and sound from a variety of sources, that can both be related and unrelated to the Common and Rome; that offer simultaneously superficial and substantial relationships to both.
The work, a video, will be returned to Powerstock Common, where it will be shown on the tumulus, its oldest marked historical site. A performance / walk will take material from the video back into the unmediated world, a kind of excavation and / or reenactment of something that hasn’t happened yet, to see what happens next.