Cerith Wyn Evans
Bubble Peddler
Feb 3-May 13, 2007
Opening: Friday, February 2 / 7pm
Tue Sun 10am6pm
Kunsthaus Graz am
Landesmuseum Joanneum
Lendkai 1, A8020 Graz
T 43-316/8017-9200, F -9212
info [at] kunsthausgraz.at
Kunsthaus Graz is proud to present Bubble Peddler, a solo exhibition of British artist of Welsh origin, Cerith Wyn Evans.
I hate the idea of being accessible, claims Cerith Wyn Evans who produces complex work which escapes conventional definitions: chandeliers and fireworks that speak, plants that are able to generate light, installations that theatricalise our experience. On the edge of magic, they bring in an uncanniness which radically alter our perception and challenges the vision. Smart and playful, self-referential and multilayered uvre of Cerith Wyn Evans is an intertextual labyrinth a palimpsest in itself – where disciplines, genres, stylistics and languages are meticulously intertwined in order to communicate knowledge and transmit emotions. A thorough investigation of the mechanisms of perception and illusion, a profound study of (political, social, queer) identities and the phenomenology of time and language these are the main areas Wyn Evans is preoccupied with in his highly performative work which bridges the most influential literary and scientific references, from William Blake to Judith Butler, as well as brings in associations to the major 20th Century art movements, from Dadaism and Surrealism to Conceptualism and Minimalism, in order to produce a work of an unusual erudition and strength. Here the light (its ability to carry a message and to illuminate, but also its counterpart, the obscurity, the negative side) together with space and spatiality (and especially, spatial limitations on the edge of visibility, voids and absences) constitute a composition where language (with its ambiguous double role as a vehicle of meaning and communication, of understanding and failure) features as a vivisected material which while being exposed to a series of transmissions and encryptions (particular acts of distancing), constantly reveals and conceals its polymorphous nature.
Cerith Wyn Evans uvre is a profound study and examination of the limits of sight and a vision. For Mark Cousins, Ceriths work is out of sight, or at least seeing it does not seem to be the right term. It concerns identification of passion. This creates neither object nor representations. Of course, as identifications their origins are quite different from their appearance, they appear to us as visions or scripture and as such they are external and independent. We are commanded by them and we try to comprehend the command. But of course, if this is a situation in which something happens all over again for the very first time, then it is within the shadow of the subject that it arises and in which something ceases all at once for the very last time.
Bubble Peddler, Cerith Wyn Evans exhibition in Kunsthaus Graz – the first one of such a scale in Austria is a rare polyphonic symphony of sophistication and elegance, orchestrated with grace and unique precision by a master of excess, but also of a minimal almost sublime gesture. A figure of subversion of spatial and temporal representation – the metaphor of Möbius strip (as inspired by Wyn Evans neon work of the same title) structures this entire exhibition which features in its centre a newly commissioned monumental neon text wall, Coloured Chinese Lanterns (2007), where the private and the intimate, conscious and unconscious are vertiginously intertwined in an endless oscillation. Here too, the textual and the sensual, the sculptural and the literary express the unhomely and the sense of loss and mourning.
“coloured chinese lanterns were lit in direct competition with the moonlight. candles were placed in niches, neon tubes screwed to wooden sticks, so that distinct zones of shadows emerged. everything had been intentionally, yet carelessly, kept in the dark. thoughts are swimming in these thousand light-moods, the night lasting longer today. brutal patterns are appearing and cellars flooding. in a house of god, kilometre-long corridors have been built. when you enter such corridors that consist entirely of hard-reflecting stone, you get drunk from the echoes. inside another house, everything meets your expectation. you are being shown around to admire. suddenly you find a letter from your mother. she begs you to sacrifice yourself for your country. with it you will be left completely alone. there is fog everywhere thanks to the fog-machines which had been set up.”
Bubble Peddler also includes Calibration and Sensitometry by R. Ziener (1987) (2006), a spectacular example of the most iconic works by Wyn Evans, the sculptural chandeliers pieces, regular chandeliers of various styles and origin, appropriated by the artists and turned into a medium where texts (literary sources from the last century including poems, letters, short stories and philosophy) being transmitted through Morse-code are translated into pulsing light bulbs thus creating a true luminous semantic space. As a counterpart to this (suspended) spectacle of private mythology, an installation Dreamachine (1998), based upon a prototype invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, explores further the phenomenon of perception: here, this first sculpture to be looked at with your eyes closed constructs a subjective cinematic space where light pulses transmitted to the brain induce an almost psychedelic state of quasi-hypnosis.
The exhibition title, Bubble Peddler, makes a reference to a lively dance, known in Kabuki theatre as Tamaya and accompanied by Kiyomoto music. A man goes through the streets performing with soap bubbles. He makes all kinds of shapes with them and describes them with a series of witty songs and dances.
Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Llanelli (Wales). He lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1984. His artistic career goes back to the London underground scene of the late 1970s, when he worked closely with the British filmmakers Derek Jarman and John Maybury and was a protagonist in the avant-garde film movement known as the New Romantics. During the 1980s, Evans worked on a number of experimental 8mm and 16mm films and in the 1990s he extended his means of expression and begun to realize the sculptural and installation works. He collaborated with choreographer Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, Throbbing Gristle, the Smiths and the Fall among others. Wyn Evans was a professor at the Architectural Association, London.
Wyn Evans solo and group exhibitions include Tate Britain (2000), Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2001), Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2003), White Cube, London (2003), 50th Venice Biennale (2003), Camden Arts Centre, London (2004), Frankfurter Kunstverein and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004), BAWAG Foundation, Vienna (2005), Musee dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2006), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2006), Stätische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich (2006).
The catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition, contains text contributions by Mark Cousins, Jonathan Crary, Martin Prinzhorn, Jan Verwoert, Adam Budak, a conversation between Alain Robbe-Grillet, Cerith Wyn Evans and Hans Ulrich Obrist as well as an introduction by Peter Pakesch and a rich visual material, including installation shots from the Kunsthaus Graz exhibition.
Cerith Wyn Evans Bubble Peddler is accompanied by the programme of the following events:
Friday, February 02, 2007 / During the Opening
Florian Hecker: Acid in the Style of David Tudor
Needle, Live Sound Performance
Tuesday, February 06, 2007 / 7 pm
Andreas Spiegl: Shining: Locked in Light
Space04, Lecture
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 / 7 pm
Juliane Rebentisch: Theatre of Things and Signs: Cerith Wyn Evans Installations
Space04, Lecture
Tuesday, April 17, 2007 / 7 pm
Bubble Peddling for Fater Focus, Part I
Film Programme curated by Cerith Wyn Evans with an introduction by the artist
Space04, Screening
Saturday, May 12, 2007
As Far Away As Here From Now / 6 pm
Hans Ulrich Obrist talks to Cerith Wyn Evans
Bubble Peddling for Frater Focus, Teil II / 8 pm
Film Programme curated by Cerith Wyn Evans with an introduction by the artist
Bubble Peddler Finissage Party / 10 pm
Space04, Conversation / Screening / Finissage Party
Additionally, between 02 and 11 of February, 2007, Kunsthaus Graz is showing Eaux dArtifice (1953), an early masterpiece by one of the key figures in the American avantgarde cinema and queer movement, Kenneth Anger. Here, the unique staging of light, the focus on the rhythmic and the suspended spectacle create a link to the exhibition of Cerith Wyn Evans.
Curator: Adam Budak
