19 June 2010 to 10 Oct 2010
Hours : Monday-Sunday 10.00-18.00.
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
South Shore Road,
Gateshead
NE8 3BA
Newcastle
United Kingdom
Europe
p: +44 (0) 191 478 1810
m:
f: +44 (0) 191 440 4944
w: www.balticmill.com
CORNELIA PARKER 19 June - 19 September 2010 Doubtful Sound
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, Cornelia Parker is one of the leading British artists of her generation. Her compelling transformations of familiar, everyday objects investigate the nature of matter, test physical properties and play on private and public meaning and value. Using materials that have a history loaded with association, a feather from Sigmund Freud’s pillow for example, Parker uses numerous methods of exploration – suspending, exploding, crushing, stretching objects and even language through her titles – displacing them to a realm between two states.
A highlight of the exhibition will be Parker’s Perpetual Canon 2004. Shown here in the UK for the first time the work consists of 60 silver-plated instruments from a brass band that have been squashed and suspended in midair. The title of the work, a musical term to describe a ‘round’, the repetition of a phrase again and again, adds to its cartoon like quality; a catastrophe frozen and forever silenced. Lit from the light of a single bulb, elaborate shadows both surround and contain the instruments, perhaps alluding to their absent players. The exhibition, which brings together drawings, photographs and small works from the artist’s ongoing ‘Avoided Objects’ series, will include new and rarely seen work.
JOHN CAGE 19 June - 5 September 2010 Every Day is a Good Day
The exhibition will include over 100 works on paper that span Cage’s entire visual art career. It will include his extraordinary Ryonaji series, described by the art critic David Sylvester as 'among the most beautiful prints and drawings made anywhere in the 1980s'. Echoing the artist’s use of chance to create work, the exhibition will be selected and installed using a computerised version of the Chinese oracle, the 'I Ching'. The exhibition is organised by Hayward Touring in collaboration with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and the John Cage Trust. A special publication will accompany the exhibition.
CAGE MIX 29 May - 19 September 2010 Sculpture & Sound
Consistently unconventional, John Cage unravelled the rules of musical composition, re-thinking and re-presenting the score. His subversive ideas and lectures on music in the 1940s and 50s were catalysts that continue to be significant to contemporary artists working today. Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound brings together the work of eight contemporary artists that use the writings and scores of Cage as a source of inspiration: Sam Belinfante, Graham Gussin, Christian Marclay, Jeremy Millar, Katie Paterson, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Richard Rigg and Katja Strunz. Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound includes work by New York based artist Paul Ramirez Jonas; with Paper Moon he has created a scaled version of the moon comprising 165 individual sheets of paper. The sentence ‘I create as I speak’ is repeated over and over again, as one long text. A lone page, a fragment of the image, is removed from the wall and left on a lectern while the public is invited to read this piece of the moon either out loud or to themselves. Katja Strunz has a constellation of components arranged on the slate floor comprising a series of brass and steel rods and parts from left over musical instruments, circular cymbals and the horn of a trumpet. Like sentinels marking time they appear associated with the production of sounds and form a bridge to astronomical listening; an aerial station of weathered instruments, the sounds of origins, and the source of the big bang. Newcastle artist Richard Rigg has created a visual conundrum with Before Interruption (2010) by creating a glass bell jar containing a brass bell. The bell is attached to a simple device that allows it to chime however the intermittent actions of a vacuum pump, suspends the sound of the bell leaving us with a bell that moves, but that we can no longer hear. Graham Gussin shows three works, including a large wall drawing in blue ink. Here sound has been put through a software program that translates it into image, producing a kind of audio map or territory, a new landscape of peaks and troughs. Another work, Vortex Mix, uses the cover of five vinyl records, placed on spinning devices on the wall.
TOMAS SARACENO 17 July - 10 October 2010
In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomas Saraceno has spent several years developing the 350 cubic metre installation that will fill BALTIC’s Level 2 Gallery from July.
Scientists create largescale models of spiders’ webs and examine their construction to explain the origin and structure of the universe. The starting point for Saraceno’s new work was a model of the poisonous Black Widow’s web. The gigantic installation, made in collaboration with the Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden, will span floor to ceiling.
