Francis Pott on BBC Radio Three
Posted on | March 31, 2010 | No Comments
Thursday 1 April 2010: Tomorrow at 2.15 the BBC Singers will present a Holy Week programme of sacred choral music live from St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge. This ends (at around 3.10 p.m.) with Francis Pott’s 17-minute dramatic setting of the hymn My Song is Love Unknown by the 17th-century poet Samuel Crossman. The BBC Singers will be conducted David Hill, who originally led the commissioning of the work for the Southern Cathedrals Festival and conducted its world premiere in 2002. The demanding organ part will be played by the celebrated British virtuoso Stephen Farr, resident Organist at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. The music is scored for soprano, alto, tenor and bass soloists, double chorus and organ. The soprano soloist’s role is of central importance to the work.
In 2004 a commercial CD recording of My Song is Love Unknown by the celebrated UK chamber choir Tenebrae led to Francis Pott’s nomination for the Barlow International Composition Award in the USA, from which he emerged in Second Place from a worldwide field of 362 composers, ceding First Prize to his friend and colleague, Judith Bingham; this was the first time any UK composer had been among the winners of the competition in its long history. The CD recording by Tenebrae [Signum Records, SIGCD 501, available through TVU's own book shop in 'The Street'] led two national journals to describe the piece as ‘a masterpiece of choral writing’.
For further details of the piece (including press notices), please go to www.francispott.com and visit the Compositions page.
Ann Arbor Film Festival shows film
Posted on | March 24, 2010 | No Comments
| A new film by Faculty of the Arts Lecturer Luciano Zubillaga has been selected for screening by the world famous Ann Arbor Film Festival in the US.
Luciano’s film, entitled “Music for a Missing film”, was fully funded by the London Artists Film and Video Awards (LAFVA). The Ann Arbor Film Festival is internationally recognized as a premiere showcase for creative, inspiring, and influential films of all types: avant-garde and experimental, story-based narratives, documentaries, and animation. Luciano has sent two films to the festival. ‘Music for a Missing Film’ has been selected as part of the competition programme of the 48th AAFF and a short visual score. ‘Music for a Missing Film’ has also recently been accepted as official selection for the Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI). |
Liberty host student Exhibition in Carnaby Street
Posted on | March 15, 2010 | No Comments
Students Celebrate 50 years of Fashion and Photography in Carnaby Street 1960 2010 with this unique, historic, photographic exhibition at Liberty.
The famous department store, Liberty, is the venue for a new and exciting exhibition by students on the BA Photography at Thames Valley University.
Delighted by this rare and exciting opportunity to exhibit at one of London¹s most prestigious venues, photography students showcase black and white landscape photography entitled ³Caught by the Thames².
The Thames, which flows like a major artery through West London¹s hinterlands, on and into the buzzing metropolis, before heading out past the Olympics construction in the East towards the sea, provided the inspiration for the exhibition. Whilst some students concentrated on the iconic architectural landmarks of London, others have explored the way that light transforms even the most banal of objects into something magical.
All the work in the show has been hand printed using traditional silver bromide materials. The exhibition is curated by Matthew Finn & Carol Hudson.
To celebrate the event, you are invited to an informal walk through on Tuesday 16th March from 4.0pm followed by a get together in The Slug and Lettuce on Wardour Street from 6.00pm.
See below for details of exhibition.
Liberty PLC
4th Floor
Great Marlborough Street
London W1B 5AH
Exhibition open: 15th March 28th March 2010
Monday Saturday 10am 9pm
Sunday 12pm 6pm
for more information please contact: Carol.Hudson@tvu.ac.uk
Reading students ‘Open for Art’ in shops
Posted on | March 12, 2010 | No Comments
Foundation Degree Art students at TVU Reading will be joining forces with 3rd year top-up students on the Advanced Art Practice BA to take part in a project in Reading town centre. The Project, ‘Open for Art’ makes the most of the opportunities afforded by empty shops in the town, by installing art exhibitions in them. The practice has been fairly well established in some towns in England during previous recessions, and artists are keen to demonstrate their entrepreneurial creativity in an activity that has a combination of very different outcomes.
The students will be installing 2 separately timed shows in an empty retail unit in Market Place over March and April, with varying themes. The work will then be viewable through the windows, and will create public interest as an alternative to seeing another empty shop as a victim of the financial climate.
Artists continually need to find new and alternative ways of promoting their work whilst they are becoming established in what they do, and finding new audiences for their work is an essential part of the process. These students will be able to use this work-based learning experience to practice team working, hone their curatorial skills, enhance their CVs, test their ability to publicise their work and inform their audiences whilst gauging the publics’ reactions and any positive results it yields.
Open for Art is a partnership project between jelly and Reading UK CIC, utilising Reading’s empty shop windows with art from Reading based artists. This follows a successful pilot project in June 2009 creating pop-up galleries in Reading. Working with the landlords and agents of Reading they use temporary spaces, creating a visual profile for the arts and showing Reading’s individuality as a town.
TVU Open for Art student projects will run from 18th March until 22 April with a changeover on April Fools Day, and can be viewed through the windows of the old Sun Tan Clinic at 36 Market Place, Reading RG1 2DE.
For more information, please go to: http://thejelly.wordpress.com/about/open-for-art/
Scholar from Cambridge University praises TVU Book ‘Genre Matters’
Posted on | March 9, 2010 | No Comments
Attached is a favourable review of Genre Matters, the edited collection (published 2006) grew out of the conference organised by Dr Garin Dowd, Dr Jeremy Strong and Dr Lesley Stevenson, all from Media in the Faculty of the Arts in 2002. Margaret Rose is an eminent scholar from Cambridge University and the review is fetaured in the well-regarded ‘Modern Philology’.
Review: Margaret Rose review of Genre Matters
Curation of Still life exhibition in Lisbon
Posted on | February 28, 2010 | No Comments
‘In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still Life’ opens at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon on 12 February 2010. Lesley Stevenson has helped to curate and write the catalogue for this first ever exhibition of still-life painting to be held in Portugal, with colleagues from Trinity College, Dublin and Essex University. This will be the first part of two major exhibitions dedicated to the genre, and will include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Holland, Flanders and France, including works by Rembrandt, Goya, Meléndez and Chardin.
The genre of still life has been largely overlooked and never achieved the same critical acclaim as portraiture, landscape or scenes of everyday life. Its humble subject-matter and the fact that it was often seen as a ‘domestic’ genre, practised by a large number of women, has contributed to its debased status. Yet by the end of the nineteenth-century and particularly in the twentieth-century, still life was widely practised by some of the most important Modernist artists and the second exhibition (opening at the end of 2011) will address this important shift. Works by Cézanne, Manet, Salvador Dali , Picasso and Matisse have already been secured.
Lesley will be happy to send an uncorrected PDF of her catalogue essay to anyone who wishes to read it.
Lawson Piano Trio performance
Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments
Wednesday 24th Feb 1pm
Vestry Hall
MA Students make big splash at Kinetica
Posted on | February 8, 2010 | No Comments
Students on the MA New Media Art and Design Course have received much publicity and accolades in reviews of their work ‘Liquid Athletes’ at Kinetica Art Fair. The work consists of water dripped into five large clear dishes that have coloured light from beneath, creating vivid colours which are then projected onto a wall. Their work was featured in The Times and Press Association press release which were syndicated across the USA.
A reviewer in a-n Interface wrote:
‘The simplest ideas are often the best and a piece by a group of students from Thames Valley University was no exception. They had put 5 OHPs together, each one projecting one colour from the 5 Olympic rings. On top of each OHP sat a bowl of water into which dripped water at the rate of a heartbeat (linking the piece to human endeavour and a ‘sequence of events’). The result was 5 huge coloured rings on the wall, constantly moving from the projection of the water ripples (Liquid Athletes). If only we could use this as the 2012 logo for the Olympic games, it was magical.’
The Times article:
the_times_olympic_artwork_makes_a_splash_at_exhibition_050210
Press Association link:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5jrYeZ1UBcvOcXmhrxtK2Cn7OpMhA )
The Thames Valley’s contribution to Kinetica was made possible by the Creative Campus Initiative and features work by staff and PG students.
Deleuze connections
Posted on | February 8, 2010 | No Comments
Dr Garin Dowd has just seen another article published. ‘“The secret pressures of the work of art”: apprenticeship and philosophy in Proust, Beckett, Deleuze and Ruiz’ has just appeared in Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust, edited by Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This is the most recent of his research projects begun in the 2006 centenary celebrations of Samuel Beckett’s birth to see the light of day. There is still one more to come!
‘“The secret pressures of the work of art”: apprenticeship and philosophy in Proust, Beckett, Deleuze and Ruiz’. in Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust, edited by Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Becketts-Proust-Deleuzes-Mary-Bryden/dp/0230201415
David Roberts Art Foundation-Gallery Talk
Posted on | February 8, 2010 | No Comments
Garin Dowd, who lectures in the areas of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, was an invitee of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster and the David Roberts Art Foundation in December. Dr Dowd was on a panel with Stephen Meville, Professor of Art History at Ohio State University and Dr. Alev Adil, Head of the Department of Creative, Critical and Communication Studies at the University of Greenwich. Running in tandem with the exhibition Sculpture in the Space Age which took place at the David Roberts Arts Foundation in Fitzrovia, the founders of IMCC at the University of Westminster, Dr Marquard Smith and Dr David Cunningham organised 4 events on the theme of ‘the future’.
The exhibition itself, according to the foundation’s press release, was [d]eveloped over the last year by Raimundas Malasauskas, the second guest curator at the David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia, Sculpture of the Space Age refers to a purely fictional exhibition mentioned in J. G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). Not detailed in the text, the exhibition was supposedly held at the Serpentine gallery in the late 70’s and exists only as a title in the short story. Invited artists Gintaras Didziapetris, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres and Rosalind Nashashibi will work collectively to create a space for this exhibition to emerge.
The final event in the series of talks ‘The Object of the Attack’ examined the topic of ‘The Future Now’. Garin’s presentation was entitled ‘Replay: conducts of time x 4 (interstitial pedagogies)’. Garin responded to the exhibition by exploring the Ballard-inspired film by Ursula Meier, Home (2008), the premise of the exhibition itself and, perhaps most surprisingly, the then topical and notorious Thierry Henry handball incident. He subjected the latter to a novel twist of interpretation using the theories of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the cultural theorist Brian Massumi. In a coincidental dovetail with Garin’s other research interests, Professor Melville presented his talk on the question of the future as this is posed in the drama of Samuel Beckett, while Dr Adil presented an infectious poem-performance-paper which, in the course of an autobiographical travelogue through the ‘non-places’ of our present (and future), animated voices from texts by the philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.
www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com
Dr Dowd’s paper was chosen to appear on the Institute’s web-page and may be read in full here:
http://instituteformodern.co.uk/2009/the-future-papers-part-two-garin-dowd
keep looking »