Live Art Cinema – It’s Alive!
Poster design by Martin McNally
Home For Waifs and Strays are joining forces with Magic Cinema to put on an event that breaks down the boundaries between performance and film.
Come and join us for a night of cinematic performance, performance for camera, video documentation of performances and more.
Artist Line-up includes;
Cally Trench and Phillip Lee
Peephole Hut (2016)
A black hut both hides and reveals the performers as they play and compete with each other within their golden lair. You are invited to peer through the peephole into the brightly-lit hut. Games of Rock Paper Scissors determine whether the performers remove or retain clothing, ultimately resulting in their wearing each other’s evening clothes. Film edited by Cally Trench, with music specially written for the film by composer Josh Hagley.
Amelia Beavis-Harrison
A Tragedy Re:Written
A video work for cinematic viewing with live cello and spoken word.
The the work brings together the story of a Romani family working in Oslo and the 1913 play Vladimir Mayakovsky A Tragedy. Mayakovskys tragedy produces physicalized emotions in the forms of ‘great big tears’ and ‘kisses that grow’. This raw emotion is brought to life in the stories told by a Roma family sharing their experiences of living in Norway and Romania. The work ultimately explores the tragedy of discrimination and its emotional impact as bodies fall through the screen.
Charlotte CHW
Ouch
Grandiose depictions of pain in cinema (e.g. Rocky, The Red Shoes), are juxtaposed with and problematised by my own abstracted and disappointing experiences of pain as depicted and explored in some of my work as an artist. Both cinematic depictions and my own are portrayed simultaneously in pre-recorded film clips (including actual film clips )and live performance (and re-performance creating a disruptive environment for the viewer. Does pop culture fetishise pain as martyrdom and reiterate religious themes?
These performed and recorded images will be presented in silence for a “levelling” effect in contrast to the onomatopoeic title of the work.
Ouch has been conceived especially for the HFWAS Live Art Cinema brief and also partly emerges from discussions around “performing pain”as part of a workshop I led for disability arts organisation Shape Arts in November 2016.
Thomas Kilby
Vertigo Live
I’m interested in making active work, work that grabs the viewer. My work is often deeply superficial and sometimes humorous. I’m interested in the exploration of space and how the physical relates to the digital. I employ a DIY lo-fi aesthetic in all of my work. I produce multi-layered appropriations, sourcing popular culture to art history, to form a video platform that explores filmic space. Creating immersive environments that look at both digital and analogue forms of filmmaking.
Pete Ashton
Echo Edit
Experience the history of cinema editing itself into a unique narrative through the medium of human gesture as artist Pete Ashton, connected to a gesture control system, allows the movies to control his movements.
Bella Lordwarf
I Have A Penis
Bella & The Lordwarfs present their fourth single: anarchic feminist anthem I Have A Penis. In this playful response to the domination of a specific male voice in everyday life Bella & The Lordwarfs front-woman, Bella Lordwarf, re-appropriates the penis in order be to heard. Alter ego of artist Flora Bradwell, Bella Lordwarf is goddess, monster, fortune teller, historian and diva; she plays with gender roles through mediums such as paint or the music video, which so often are dominated by the male gaze.
Gareth Proskourine-Barnett
Fractured Perspectives
This lecture-performance weaves together real and imagined histories by adopting the role of the cyber-flaneur to interrogate examples of Brutalist architecture on the internet. As the form of the buildings dissolves in cyberspace, so does the idea that architecture is static or immobile. We are not moving: the buildings are! Gareth Proskourine-Barnett explores the implication of these movements for Brutalism and how this alters our perception of fact and fiction.
John Bradburn
Presence
A spirits manifest on the screen. An audio visual ritual for a broken city. Bass, Heavy Guitar and distorted rhythms attempt to tease out the possibilities for connection across disparate spaces and the screen itself asking the question is it a window or a barrier?
Swoomptheeng
Swoompipe
Play Xbox360 with Swoomptheeng as they pass around the Swoompipe and make themselves dance. The swoompipe is a bluetooth DJ controller in the form of a panpipe which you blow into used to play a homemade 3D game. Part music video, part interactive game, part sculpture, part innovative product, the performance plays with ideas around the application of art and design, the purpose of games and videos, and the importance of friendship, socialising and how our identities and culture are formed by the things we make and share.
Emily Warner & Martin McNally
Open Water Surgery: Patient Administration
Open Water Surgery: Patient Administration is a new collaborative work by Martin McNally and Emily Warner. This cinematic performance gradually reveals, unveils and dissipates, touching upon the fluid nature of life and questioning what it is to move with a current or to obstruct one. Using patterns, actions, light, movement and sound, OWS:PA promises an amalgamation of mediums that playfully explore the tension between natural process and manipulated interference. This is a work that questions our innermost intentions and asks what level of control and administration we actually have over them.
Matthew Springer
Training Day
A simulator of Tension, Conflict and Escalation.
Recorded performance of static back peddling, overlaid with a projection of fast moving armoured vehicles to a repetitive bass driven electronic score.
£3 entry on the door
The Edge, 79-81 Cheapside, Birmingham B12 0QH
25th May 2017
7pm – 10pm