More Film Festival

David Gatten's Secret History Of The Dividing Line: A True Account In
Nine Parts
Hyde Park Picture House | Sunday 4 November | 2pm | £5/4 with tea &
cake & David Gatten in person

David Gatten is one of the most important experimental filmmakers of
our time. Over the last ten years his films have explored the
intersection of the printed word and the moving image. On a rare
visit to the UK he will present the first four films of his ambitious
Byrd project, a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books,
ghosts and the Byrd Family of Virginia during the early 18th century.
Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film
processes, the films trace the contours of both private lives and
public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and
poetry with experiments in cinematic form.

Presented by William Rose in association with the Hyde Park Picture
House. With kind thanks Mark Webber and the London Film Festival.

Leeds International Film Festival

The Leeds International Film Festival presents:

DIALOGUES:

Robert Fenz
Eve Heller
Jayne Parker
Nicolas Rey

Four of the world's foremost artist filmmakers come to Leeds to show
their own work in dialogue with films that inspire them

- - - -

ROBERT FENZ
Thursday 8 November, 7.30–9.30pm, The Carriageworks Studio

Trained as both a filmmaker and musician, American artist Robert Fenz
makes rich and poetic portraits of people and places. Fenz is a
master of cinematography capturing the world as though through the
eyes of an anonymous observer, elevating the audience from the world,
just enough to reveal what’s hidden. He has traveled to Brazil, Cuba,
Poland, Turkey and India to make his films and is currently
completing a new portrait of acclaimed ethnographic filmmaker Robert
Gardner, which will be screened as a work in progress. Including
works by two of America’s most acclaimed avant-garde filmmakers,
Peter Hutton and James Benning, the works in this programme transform
natural and urban landscapes into contemplative cinematic vistas.

- - - -

JAYNE PARKER
Friday 9 November, 7.30–9pm, The Carriageworks Studio

“This programme reflects my interest in the material properties of
film and how the emulsion can hold an image. Each of these works help
me to think about the different ways film can be structured; I'm
filled with wonder at what film can do.” JP

Discovering film in the late 70s, British artist Jayne Parker is one
of the UK’s most influential artists working with the moving image.
Challenging the mediums of film and video, her work often possesses
the striking rawness of documentary, whilst retaining a pure,
ambiguous and sculptural form. Parker's programme represents a
quintessential selection of works from the canon of experimental film
history. Including Len Lye, Hollis Frampton, Hans Richter, Kenneth
Anger, Maya Deren and many others.

- - - -

EVE HELLER
Saturday 10 November, 3–5pm, The Carriageworks Studio

"Dedicated to capabilities unique to film, the first part of my
programme honors the observational camera; and the second
specifically highlights the materiality of the medium and the poetic
language unleashed through exploiting its plastic limitations and
potentials." EH

The films of American artist Eve Heller offer a poetic and
uncompromised eye on the world, providing a contemplative and often
melancholic space for the audience. Almost always silent, and using
black and white film, her short works have a rare transcending
quality, moving through filmic time with a profound and subconscious
fluidity. In this programme four of Heller’s own films are testified
alongside essential works by Standish Lawder, Phil Solomon and Phil
Hoffman.

- - - -

NICOLAS REY
Sunday 11 November, 7–10pm (with break), The Carriageworks Studio

French filmmaker Nicolas Rey has been making films since 1993. He is
co-founder of L’Abominable, an artisan film lab in Paris, and the
alchemical transformation of film is central to his practice. His
often-durational works hover somewhere between photography,
documentary and experimental film – at once examining and questioning
industry, society, history and the meaning of images – yet remaining
always highly personal and poetic. This screening sees the UK
premiere of Rey’s feature length film 'Schuss!', set in the mountains
and eluding as much to the slopes of capitalism as it does to alpine
skiing. Showing alongside 'Tahousse' by Olivier Fouchard and Mahine
Rouhi in which the mythical mountains of Kurdistan are fortified on
vivid celluloid.

- - - -

Curated by William Rose for the Leeds International Film Festival
Funded by Arts Council England Yorkshire and Leeds City Council

TICKETS & VENUE

Tickets for each screening: £4.50 full price, £3.50 concessions

Box Office:
0113 224 3801
City Centre Box Office
The Carriageworks Theatre, 3 Millennium Square
Leeds, LS2 3AD
Open Mon - Sat 10am –8pm

All screenings take place at the Carriageworks Studio:

The Carriageworks Theatre
3 Millennium Square
Leeds LS2 3AD
Tel: 0113 224 3801

For full details on the Leeds International FIlm Festival visit:
http://www.leedsfilm.com/

Hans Peter Kuhn- Competition

Student Competition:
In collaboration with ‘A Sound and Light Transit’, a major public art commission for Leeds with artist Hans Peter Kuhn and Bauman Lyons Architects.

Background:

Leeds City Council have commissioned a light and sound installation from Hans Peter Kuhn to be sited under the Neville Street railway bridge ‘gateway’ to Leeds. The installation will be an integrated feature of the upgrade and refurbishment of Neville Street, and is part of a larger £4.5 million environmental improvement scheme to upgrade the key southern entrance to Leeds. The project involves agencies and companies from many disciplines – architects, sound engineers, project managers etc. The project has an interpretative programme attached to it through which four students from four institutions in Leeds, the Met, Leeds University, Leeds College of Music and ourselves at LCAD can engage with the city through series of responses specifically around the extended use of sound and it’s physical realisation.

Competition brief:

To enter the competition: fill in the competition form available from the Fine Art office. Deadline is January 18th 2008. A shortlist will be selected by a panel of staff on the basis of coursework submitted at the end of the first semester (January, 2008), with the successful student announced by the end of January. You will also attend the lecture by Hans Peter Kuhn on November 20th in the Studio Lecture Theatre, Blenheim Walk.


The winner of the competition will receive a bursary (around £500), the chance to work with the other students from the partner institutions in a series of seminars and masterclasses with Hans Peter Kuhn, Arup Associates’ SoundLab in London, the Sonic Arts Network and others involved in ‘A Sound and Light Transit’. You will be responding to a commissioning brief that will ask you to outline your aims, research proposal and budget. As well you will be asked to make a proposal for a piece of work to be included in the launch exhibition of the project in October, 2008 at Project Space Leeds (Whitehall Waterfront) with your work realised in a public area in the city.

A Sound and Light Transit:

LED Light wall

‘The east wall of the Neville street tunnel (80m) will be covered with perforated steel panels with sound absorbing material behind them. About every 10 cm vertically and horizontally an acrylic glass piece will be placed into one of the perforation holes. The complete wall is therefore covered with a simple dotted pattern. About 10 % of these acrylic rods will be equipped with white LEDs that are programmable. The programme will allow varying patterns of horizontal and vertical lines of LED light. Every early morning, at a time of least traffic, the pattern will change – chosen by a random
generator – and one will never see the same pattern twice.' The Artist

Sound works

‘The concept for the sound installation is to alter the environment psychologically, as physical possibilities are extremely limited. In addition to the reduction of the sound level through physical interventions such as wall cladding, it is suggested that sounds added to the ambient sound environment will reduce its current aggressiveness. As the traffic noises are not constant but rather changing all the time, a system with noise sensors will be installed and the level of the sounds will be controlled in accordance to the acoustic situation. A specific composition of sounds will be written that has an amount of
randomness involved, so that it will be always changing. The sounds move along the street and fill partly the noise gaps and by thus creates a smoother acoustic.’ The Artist

Links:

http://www.hpkuhn-art.de/
http://2006.biennial.com/content/Programme/ArtistDirectory/article_35_16.aspx
http://sonambiente.net/en/04_artists/4M2kuh_werk.html
http://www.arup.com/acoustics/whatwedo.cfm?pageid=4725

Light Night Leeds 2007

Light Night 2007
As part of Celebrate Leeds 2007, Light Night returns to give new perspectives on the city using illumination techniques.
Exactly one month before Leeds' 800th birthday, the Celebrate Leeds 2007 festival invites you to an after hours celebration of the bizarre, secret, fantastic, surreal history of your city.
From twilight through midnight and beyond, experience games on the streets, songs in prison cells, boat trips to nowhere, buglers on towers, dancing in galleries, awesome illuminations and curious creations in churches... Be a tourist, a night-tripper and a sight-seer in your own city.

This autumn, Leeds City Council and cultural partners from all over the city ask you to look again at the city that you thought you knew. Based on the European model of Nuit Blanches, venues all across the city will open their doors late into the night and will play host to the unexpected, the magical, the musical, the sinister & the surreal...
Look out for brochures, websites, or just gather below the BBC Big Screen on Millennium Square on the night to find out where to go, what to do.
Last year saw hundreds of people in white boiler suits dancing along the length of Briggate with shire horses, bagpipes & ice cream vans, fantastic interractive light sculptures in Holy Trinity Church, a string quartet playing at the top of the Town Hall Clock Tower.
Leeds' Light Night 2007 takes place on Friday 12 October 2007. For more details check out the website:


http://www.lightnight.co.uk/home.htm

Project Space Leeds- Wildwood

In the dictionary ‘wildwood’ is defined as natural uncultivated woodland, a place shaped by its own essential characteristics rather than organised according to some logic or structure of human activity.

This exhibition addresses the idea of wildwood as an actuality - a forest, a woodland, a place where trees exist, and as a metaphor – the wildwood of the imagination. The deep, dark forest of the mind untouched by the constructs of rational thought. The untamed element of consciousness where dream and myth and metaphor are the reality beyond the routine of everyday experience.

The exhibition presents a range of works by recent graduates, emerging and established artists in different forms including drawing, sculpture, photography, film, sculptural projection and taxidermy.

Wildwood is curated by Pippa Hale, Kerry Harker and Diane Howse.

Go to http://www.projectspaceleeds.org.uk/ for more info.

PSL is at :
Whitehall Waterfront
2 Riverside Way
Leeds LS1 4EH, UK

Brothers Quay and Opera North

Quay Brothers: Orfeo (Part of 'Trading Spaces')
12 October – 20 January 2008

To coincide with Opera North's new production of Orpheus and Eurydice (which sees its 400th anniversary in 2007) the Gallery (Yorkshire Bank Gallery) hosts a large–scale 'model décor' of Eurydice's Realm in the Underworld.

'Orfeo' is part of the Art Gallery's 'Trading Spaces' project which looks at Leeds as a contemporary city which has its roots in the charter of 1207 when Leeds was first declared a town. 2007 marks the 800th year since the charter and a city–wide programme of events will be taking place as part of the Celebrate Leeds 2007 festival.

Henry Moore Institute Talks - Thomas Schutte

Thomas Schütte, now regarded as one of Germany’s foremost sculptors, had astonishing early success with a group of works which hung on the wall and referenced forms such as tiles, wallpaper and garlands. Fake/Function Thomas Schütte: Early Work brings together for the first time the complete set of these early ‘decorative’ works which use the techniques of theatrical trompe l’oeil to transform interior spaces. The exhibition coincides with the unveiling of Schütte's sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square taking place in November.

There will be a series of Wednesday evening talks given at the Institute on the subject of art and illusion and contextualising Schutte's work. Admission is free.

Go to http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/matrix_engine/content.php?page_id=31 for more info.

Fred update

What is the purpose of a civic monument.? How do we see it, how do we relate to the space it occupies, how do we look at it?

A civic statue undergoes a transformation of colour, shape and texture. Does it become more or less of a monument?


The stone statue of James Steel ( a former mayor of Carlisle) is covered in a knitted ‘cosy’, turning the plain stone statue in to a brightly coloured emblem

ARTIST’S STATEMENT- Jenni Danson


I have a fascination with the spaces that we do not see. In particular public spaces and public statues that we pass in our everyday lives but whose presence we ignore. My work interferes with these neglected spaces and makes them more visible. This alters our perception of the object in the space and the space it occupies.

Use of textiles (knitting and twined threads) brings a feminist element to public spaces that are masculine in conception, design and construction. Knitting softens the hard masculine lines and brings the viewer to question the object hidden below.

The use of colour contradicts our idea of the ‘normal’ for public memorial sculpture.