Stanley Picker Gallery
Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture
Kingston University London
Kingston upon Thames KT1 2QJ
UK
Stanley Picker Gallery is delighted to announce the appointments of artist Cally Spooner and designer Yuri Suzuki as Stanley Picker Fellows 2016, at Kingston University London.
Cally Spooner (b. 1983) is an artist and writer born in London, where she is currently based. Her work consists of media installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and a musical, which grapple with the organisation and dispossession of that which lives. She often uses rehearsals, or the episodic form, as a means, and an end, in itself. Recent solo shows include New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Aspen Art Museum, and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2015). Her essays/writing have appeared in Flash Art and Artforum; her book of scripts is published by SlimVolume (2016) and she is the author of the novel, Collapsing In Parts published by Mousse.
Over the course of her Fellowship research, Spooner will seek a cross-disciplinary exchange with Kingston University’s Schools of Humanities; Performance and Screen Studies; and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), to unpack the politics, ethics and economics of collaboration in the creative industries. Operating both practically and academically, her Fellowship will become groundwork for the formation of a more or less functional performance company. Through study-groups, networking, publishing and knowledge building, Spooner’s research activities will explore and test models of generative, collective production, alongside analysis of contemporary states of management and power; directorial presence, authorial absence, the trusting in (or harnessing of) the genius of one’s “cast.”
Yuri Suzuki (b. 1980) is a sound designer and electronic musician born in Tokyo and based in London. Suzuki’s projects explore the realm of sound, interaction and electronics through designed objects. Since 2013, he teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and works as an associate for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop and Teenage Engineering. Suzuki is the founder of Yuri Suzuki Ltd (YS Lab)—an R&D consultancy working with companies including Google, Panasonic and Disney. His works OTOTO and Colour Chasers were acquired by MoMA in 2014.
Suzuki’s design practice raises questions around our relationship to sound, and how music and sound may affect people’s minds. He is interested in how contemporary products and infrastructures remain often under-developed in their sound features, while being highly refined in terms of visual design and technology. Suzuki will use his Stanley Picker Fellowship to work with Kingston University’s teaching staff and students to investigate the psychological and physical agency of sound and explore how more thoughtfully designed soundscapes could improve our daily lives. By staging a series of design experiments, workshops and interviews in collaboration with sound practitioners, including musician Matthew Herbert among others, Suzuki will seek to develop a number of designed products proposing new ways in which sound can inhabit the everyday.
The Stanley Picker Fellowship programme sits at the very heart of the Gallery’s activities. Supported by the Stanley Picker Trust since its inception in 1977, the annual scheme provides an artist and a designer each with a research grant and valuable access to the extensive material workshops, technical resources and expertise within the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture and the wider University for a period of 12-18 months. The Fellowship culminates with the presentation of a body of new work at the Stanley Picker Gallery. Over the last decade Fine Art Fellows have included Oreet Ashery, David Austen, Andy Holden, Simon Martin, Laura Oldfield Ford, Elizabeth Price and Nicole Wermers. El Ultimo Grito were awarded the very first Design Fellowship in 2004, with subsequent design recipients including Yemi Awosile, Boudicca, Fabien Cappello, Daniel Eatock, Shelley Fox, Onkar Kular, Julia Lohmann, Ab Rogers and Marloes ten Bhömer. A new public call for Fellowship applicants will take place in May 2017.