Cell Project Space presents “Fata Morgana” a solo project by Irish born, London based artist Laura Buckley. For “Fata Morgana,” Buckley has initiated an ambitious single screen installation commissioned specifically for the CYcLORAMA series and produced with the assistance of Cell, The Arts Council of England and The Irish Arts Council. The title “Fata Morgana” refers to a highly complex superior mirage where inverted and erect images are stacked one on top of another causing an object on the horizon to be distorted beyond recognition. The name also refers to Morgan le Fay, mythical figure from the Arthurian legends at once a villain, seductress, witch, healer or goddess, her unquestionable power is dictated by her ability to shape-shift throughout the myths and legends in which she appears.

This personification of a natural phenomenon and anthropomorpic sensibility in humanity gently riffs through Buckley’s work. For the past four years Buckley has been producing multifaceted installations incorporating components ranging from motorised plywood structures, Perspex sculptures, sound and projected moving image. Her idiosyncratic use of light both within her installations and films is exacerbated by the sleek surfaces she includes which reflect projections onto the viewer, or are the focus and subject matter of the films themselves. Where previously mechanical movement of objects has made up an important part of her installations, in Fata Morgana both the film and the sculpture are static. This allows the fast paced edit of the film and surface of the sculpture to interact with the body and perception of the entering viewer, including and absorbing them into the kaleidoscopic installation.

Originally trained as a painter Buckley now builds upon her experimentation with image making via techniques of scanning. Her recent investigations into the abilities of a flatbed scanner to record objects in motion are entitled “Moving Image Series” and are included alongside the more overtly sculptural work. By moving readymade and assembled sculptures over the bed of the machine she allows the mobile lens of the scanner to capture their foreshortened surfaces and movement. For Fata Morgana, Buckley has used the most basic form of animation – filming a still image by scrolling it in-front of the cameras lens – in much the same way the objects themselves were moved before the lens of the scanner. Thereby transferring them between sculpture and moving image work to create a physical and visual presence from light rather than paint.

Often shooting her digital footage on a mobile phone or handheld camera Buckley’s projected digital films conjure up memories of early modernist experiments in form and motion by László Moholy-Nagy or Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs. Focusing on simple everyday encounters with the world, which when absorbed by the entire installation become elements of a larger composition or abstract narrative. By dissolving the resolution between artwork and the body’s encounter with it Buckley allows the viewer to become entirely subsumed by the abstract image causing a hypnotic or trance-like experience.

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Saturday, 25th February 2012, 7pm-9pm
Artist, Laura Buckley and Andy Spence of ‘New Young Pony Club’
Live audio visual collaborative closing event for Fata Morgana

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at Cell Project Space, London

through February 26, 2012

Laura Buckley, Fata Morgana, 2012. Courtesy: the artist and Cell Project Space, London

at Herald St, London

until February 26, 2012

Courtesy of Herald St, London

For Virginia Overton, the truck is a working tool embodied with stored labor. Rather than a symbolic object of desire in the mode of the co-opted muscle car, she recognizes the truck as a worker. Like most of her tools and materials, the truck functions as an agent for labor production.

Overton once drove an old pickup truck from Norfolk, Virginia to Memphis, Tennessee.  This act became a means for a sculptural gesture. Along the way she casually collected material found roadside, including: discarded lumber, furniture and other commodities drained of their use value. Arriving in Tennessee she invited friends to install work inside a borrowed RV that she rigged to her truck bed full of refuse. Taken together, the drive, the truck bed full of junk and RV installation allowed Overton to regard them collectively as an act of construction, retrospectively building her mode of working into new structures and practices.

Ratchet straps, timber, ladders, commercial grade lighting and electrical fittings, are among the tools used in Overton’s intuitive sculptural arrangements. By balancing, wedging, suspending and cinching, a distillation of the working material occurs. It can be said that labor is crystallized in these objects of utility.  The sculptures work and expend labor in an effort to create a new general utility.  Similar to the firebrick of Carl Andre’s Equivalents or the slabs of lead and steel of Richard Serra, the materials are embedded with potential of returning to their origin of function. The rendered contingency of Overton’s provisional arrangements could easily be dispatched back to the construction site, trash pile or driven across the Texas ranch.

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at The Power Station, Dallas

through March 30, 2012

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Above – Virginia Overton, Chevy Deluxe (detail), 2012

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Virginia Overton, Chevy Deluxe, 2012

Virginia Overton, Untitled (Broncos vs Patriots), 2012

Virginia Overton, Untitled (large mouth bass), 2012

Virginia Overton, Untitled (I-beam light and royal blue), 2012

Virginia Overton, Untitled (spare tire, ratchet strap, vinyl hose), 2012

Virginia Overton, Untitled (hash mark decal), 2012

“one and the other are another” is the first exhibition by Clara Meister, the 2012 Curatorial Resident at the contemporary art space Ludlow 38. The group show includes new and recent works by five mostly Berlin-based artists. It deals with language and translation in a reflection about the emergence of new meaning in communication – in text and speech as well as in well-known images and shared concepts.

In “The Jungle Book Project” (2002), Pierre Bismuth gives every speaking character of the original Walt Disney film its own specific language. By assembling all dubbed versions of the animated film, he creates a Babylonian encounter of languages in the jungle. This intervention makes a film that is part of today’s pop culture become unintelligible to the viewer. At the same time, our collective knowledge about the story and its characters makes the importance of understanding through language fade away.

Antonia Hirsch’s “Eintracht/Zwietracht (Bridge)” (2006-2012), two equally sized, immediately adjacent color fields, will be installed for the first time at this exhibition. The colors match the paints originally chosen during the Cold War era by East and West Germany for a bridge spanning between the cities of Berlin and Potsdam. While both political systems had agreed on the color green, each one interpreted this chromatic category differently. Underneath the naming and categorization of colors through a semiotic system such as language, their socio-cultural codification is revealed.

Jonathan Monk passed a sentence about the distinctiveness of speech by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein through an online translation program and created the original work “some words of wisdom from Wittgenstein translated by Google around the world from A through Z (with two mistakes)” (2012) for this exhibition. In a successive translation from one language into another without going back to the original quote, he plays a telephone game of translation.

In his collages (2010-2011), Hank Schmidt in der Beek recombines known classics of modern art with comics, an art form in which language is embedded in the image as actual writing. The image layers in the collages create the possibility of a new reading and bring to light a wit some of the classics might have lost in the process of becoming part of art history.

Ignacio Uriarte’s video “Infinity” (2010) is an animated attempt to make the handwritten infinity symbol truly infinite by moving its beginning and end points forward in an infinite loop. To achieve this, the symbol is copied repeatedly from the previous copy, provoking a continuous organic change of the original shape.

The upcoming year with Clara Meister at “Ludlow 38” focuses on different concept of translation and brings together an exhibition program with interdisciplinary forms. It is based on the assumption that artistic ideas can be translated into different forms and therefore take different modes of expression. In other words, an idea can come to sound in a performance, can be painted or photographed or can take the shape of an installation. The artistic expression is a translation process – from an idea or a question to a form.

The publications will be designed by Quentin Walesch and published by Sternberg Press.

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at MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, New York

through March 18, 2012

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Above – Antonia Hirsch, Eintracht/Zwietracht (Bridge), 2006-2012

Pierre Bismuth, The Jungle Book Project, 2002

Pierre Bismuth, The Jungle Book Project, 2002

Jonathan Monk, some words of wisdom from Wittgenstein translated by Google around the world from A through Z (with two mistakes), 2012

Jonathan Monk, some words of wisdom from Wittgenstein translated by Google around the world from A through Z (with two mistakes), 2012

Ignacio Uriarte, Infinity, 2010

Hank Schmidt in der Beek, collages, 2010-2011

Hank Schmidt in der Beek, collage, 2010-2011

Hank Schmidt in der Beek, collage, 2010-2011

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All images by Meister/Lehner/Fiedler