HOME exhibitions ARTISTS CONTACT membership LINKS ONE MILE
Gallery Pics NWSP15 Will Duke / Alexander Stalmann

duke1

duke2

 

stalmann1

stalmann2

Galleries I and II

Will Duke is interested in creating an immersive space in which to examine ideas around our built environment both locally and universally. For the New Work Scotland Programme Will is showing a new computer generated animation which takes the work beyond a direct representation of real space. Trapped in an endless cycle the piece begins outside a run down, empty, industrial building that is being gradually smothered by metallic ventilation pipes reminiscent of chemical factories or curiously enough the Pompidou Center in Paris. Eventually the pipes form a metallic shell, resembling some kind of robotic insect or alien machine before retracting and releasing the building returning it to it’s original state. The fascination with technology betrays a homage to its binary opposite, nature. Comparisons can be made to organisms that feed off a host and multiply in the process, the pipes engulfing the building inside and out like those nature tv programmes with speeded up footage of parasites feeding off the carcass of a larger animal. The cycle of life as displayed through the industrialised built environment.
On viewing the installations of Alexander Stalmann it is significant that the materials he uses are banal and disposable, significant because the sum of the parts is not as large as the whole, its entirety suspending our belief in the normal life of the materials. When confronted by the arrangement of polythene, washing powder, a few lights, some 2" by 2", we find ourselves immersed in a fictive world that depicts an effortless logic that defies easy explanation.
Trained as a painter, he is aware of the history of painting as used to create the sublime. Often for religious purposes painting has sought to transform paint and canvas, rather mundane in themselves, into an object that is revered and worshipped. Similarly materials such as gold can carry the illusion of illumination and the sublime but on closer inspection fail to bring anything more than their monetary value and by that cheapening the ambitions and attitudes it seeks to convey. Aware of these shifting sands Stalmann attempts to hold the elements of his materials and bond them into a distilled picture in three dimensions. For NWSP he has created the sense of a landscape, punctuated with some drawings/paintings that add detail to the terrain giving the viewer access to differing scales, and fresh perspectives on the possibilities of the prosaic and the spiritual.

images from top:
2501 video animation by Will Duke
2501 video animation by Will Duke
Always the Sun by Alexander Stalmann
Always the Sun by Alexander Stalmann

 

sole1

sole 2

  

 

Project Room

The Space In-Between the Sole and the Heel

Originally conceived by Matthew Hearn and Sarah Warden

The slippers were soft sheepskin moccasin bootees. I bought them on West Broadway. By the time I drew them there was slightly more hole than slipper, the soles shiny and slippery, one half eaten by a silent South African dog (bark-free, not silent, for he would jump up on the speakers and sing to Miles Davis). They returned to New York several times, and were once left behind in anger (in Manchester) after the slippery soles and I slipped down the stairs two nights before leaving, breaking my toe-bones on bannister rods. The next slippers were not so soft, but they fastened with a zip and were less slippery.
For years my mother went twice a week to the variety market in Belfast, buying linens and quilts, bric-a-brac, clothes and shoes. When my sister or I came home from England we would each rifle cupboards, territorially, checking what had appeared or disappeared since we had last been.
There was a particular cupboard in the dining room that for years had been hidden by the piano, and it was here that I found the fur boots. They were strangely and almost obscenely furry: white sheepskin inside, black sealskin outside, with leather toecaps and tassels on the ends of the laces that danced when I danced in the freezing cold of Saint Edward’s Confraternity Club for Men. I had these boots for years in Manchester, in damp cold studios and in overheated bars, until the crepe soles detatched and refused to be mended, even at the point of my brother’s silicon glue gun. They fitted no-one else in the family. My mother had bought them speculatively, like Sooty, giving them a warm dry home till they were needed. I brought them with me to Newcastle, but I could no longer wear them. And, maybe moving again, I made drawings to remember them by.
I have lost the drawings that I made of the slippers and of the boots. Maybe they are between the pages of a book that I have yet to re-read, and will fall out one day and surprise me, or in a bag of letters that I might one day want to read again. Maybe they are in a book that I thought I would re-read, but sent to Oxfam, saving space again, only less of it. Maybe you have them at home already, or maybe they are on the wall.
Roxy Walsh

Images from top: Installation view, Jamie Shovlin
{ HOME } { EXHIBITIONS } { OFF-SITE PROJECTS } { CONTACT } { LINKS } { ONE MILE }

© COLLECTIVE GALLERY 2003 All Rights reserved