Friday, September 16, 2011

Charles Campbell- Actor/Transporter

ACT 5 - final action, reception & discussion
Sunday September 18th at 6pm
- Alice Yard
( 4 - 5.30 pm - actual performance investigation - Wild Flower Park, P.O.S.)

Charles Campbell is among a new generation of contemporary Caribbean artists working to explore and disrupt the region’s dominant social narratives. He has exhibited widely in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, representing Jamaica in events such as the Havana
Biennial and the Brooklyn Museum’s Infinite Islands exhibition. His work uses images culled from the Caribbean's history of slavery and emancipation to investigate the intersection between meaning and image and open up the possibility of personal and social transformation. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and currently lives and works in Canada.
His recent work has investigated and re-imagined the traditional Actor Boy character from the Jamaican Jonkonnu festival, a trickster figure and “agent of chaos and change.” Campbell writes: “Rather than remaining the character from Belisario’s print, a character from the past, I envision him as a character from one of the possible futures that was alive at the time of emancipation and a sort of embodiment of the coexistence of multiple futures.”

Looking at the Rational Utopianism of Buckminster Fuller as one of these multiple futures, Campbell has begun to create a series of three-dimensional spheres, drawing on Fuller’s geodesic domes: vehicles for the transport and circulation of people, ideas, and images, which “simultaneously excite different ways to understand something we see.” Campbell’s participation in ACT 5 is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Act 5 project statement here
See previous event pictures here & video

All are invited.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

ACT 5: The Performative Moment

Opens Sunday 11 September, 2011, 5.30 to 8.00 pm

cooper helmet

From the Helmet Series, by James Cooper


In September 2011, Alice Yard marks its fifth anniversary as an independent space for creative investigation, with a programme of events called ACT 5: The Performative Moment.

On Sunday 11 September, from 5.30 to 8 pm, Alice Yard hosts the opening of a show of live and documented actions by six artists: Ebony G. Patterson, Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, Charles Campbell, Hew Locke, James Cooper, and Marlon Griffith.

Actions in space and time operate at the juncture between remembered or conjured pasts and futures. Within this perpetual moment — remembered or recorded, privately or publicly enacted, never dependent on a fixed location or context — the contemporary, as an investigative visual enterprise, can be understood as more than just an inventory of cultural commodities or itinerant objects aspiring for visibility or institutional embraces. To many, this shifty and shifting lack of materiality is still seen as weakness when it comes to comparative or competitive questions of visibility and the historical record.

ACT 5
is simply a sequence in this ongoing process of transforming the value of our actions and the varied spaces in which we live and imagine. It is an alternative only to the way we may have forgotten aspects of our living past.

— Christopher Cozier

All are invited to attend the opening event and participate in this continuing dialogue. The ACT 5 installation can also be viewed on Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 September, from 5 to 7 pm, and by special arrangement. Contact helloaliceyard@gmail.com for more information.

locke serpent

Serpent of the Nile (2007), by Hew Locke, from the How Do You Want Me? series


Find out how you can support Alice Yard and ACT 5 here.