Three-Fold
Three-Fold
Catherine Payton, Alexandra Ross & Catherine Street
10th, 17th, 24th November & 1st December 2012
GENERATORprojects
Three-fold offers a simple proposition: three consecutive events, with each event providing a platform of focus to one of three divergent practices. Through the commonality of the event and notions of the transitory and instantaneous within the artists’ selected works a delicate narrative is woven. This narrative, whilst ephemeral in nature, is employed as a catalyst for discourse on the fourth weekend, with the artists invited back to take part in an afternoon of discussion with the Generator Projects’ Committee.
10 NOV - 7PM*
Catherine Street
CONTINUUM
This site-specific event will be an immersive experience featuring a new film by artist Catherine Street. The film will be followed by spoken word performances by poet JL Williams and Catherine Street, as well as live performances by composers and improvisers Martin Parker and Owen Green.
The film derives its sound and image from the exhausted body of the artist. Meanwhile writings by Street and Williams allude to the sensual, experiential world of human perception alongside a theoretical conception of time and space as described by mathematics. Green and Parker’s live performances build in intensity over time and the listener is made very much aware of the physical nature of sound as it is created by bodies interacting in space.
The video, Continuum, was shot by filmmakers Ben Ewart-Dean and Daniel Warren, with sound by Owen Green and performance by Catherine Street and Dmitry Ser.
*The performance starts at 7:30PM.
17 NOV - 7PM
Alexandra Ross
Are we on the air yet?
How do we behave, or rather misbehave when a recording device is present and importantly, turned on? In this age of a proliferation of easily accessible recording equipment, how has this affected the spontaneous interaction so often embodied in the medium of conversation? With the meta theme of the event being the art of conversation, doctoral researcher Alexandra Ross hopes to unpick the social norms and qualities of conversation as it sits on and off the record, with the ominous undertone of ‘is this being recorded? Notions of truth, trust and dissemination of these exchanges run through the event.
Please be aware that parts of the day will be recorded.
A bespoke online platform is currently under construction to host some of the interstitial conversations around curatorial practice resulting from her research www.continuous-curatorial-conversations.org.
24 NOV - 7PM
Catherine Payton
13 Levitations
13 Levitations is a short film in which Catherine Payton attempts to relive the levitation experience of medium, Colin Evans, as witnessed during a large public séance he conducted in 1938. Over time Payton has mastered his technique and can here be seen to levitate 13 times in quick succession.
Saturday 1st December
12 - 6pm
As a moment of reflection and opportunity to explore the various themes and ideas arising from Three-fold, Generator Projects is pleased to invite back Catherine Street, Alexandra Ross and Catherine Payton for an afternoon of discussion. Employing a format that favours a relaxed convivial environment, each artist and curator will discuss their respective practice within the context of the Three-fold events. Also contributing to the conversation will be invited guests Kirstie Skinner, Sarah Cook and Tom Nolan.
Catherine Street's installations are pervasive and dramatic. Layering elements of video, sound, drawing, collage, texts, and performance she creates potent and atmospheric environments. Street's own body is often present on film and in actuality, undertaking tasks of endurance and repetition. A viewer entering such environments, and encountering this body, is liable to feel a strong emotional response: of unease, repulsion, fascination, surprise, exhilaration, even hilarity.
Alexandra Ross is based in Dundee where she is currently conducting doctoral research in the field of curatorial practice exploring the scope and efficacy of conversation-as-method within curatorship and the capturing of its history.
Catherine Payton's work proffers a potentially frustrating sense of the unknowable, where the familiar and ordinary are transformed to incorporate and create unlikely and strange scenarios. Through constructed narratives and their interplay with objects, sculptures and film, she invites the viewer to suspend their disbelief and invest in the implausible reality before them. Like Blanche DuBois, she doesn't want realism. She wants magic.
Invited Guests:
Dr Kirstie Skinner is a writer, lecturer and arts consultant, and is Director of Outset Scotland Contemporary Art Fund.
Dr Sarah Cook is a curator and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of the book Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Sara Diamond) of Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues.
Tom Nolan is an artist and co-director of Rhubaba Gallery and Studios, Edinburgh. He has regularly collaborated with Catherine Payton on projects and has been working on a biography of Payton since they met in 2003.
*Generator Projects woud like to thank Frasers Fruit & Veg and Fisher & Donaldson for their kind donations.