I’m happy to be part of Land Odyssey at GENERATORpojects in Dundee.

An exhibition of works by Dave Evans, Aaron Guy,
Hannah Imlach and Erik Osberg.

GENERATOR is beginning a journey through contemporary approaches to ‘landscape’ and our relations to it. Narrating our paths, the invited artists will guide us through mountains from beyond our fictions; the voids we create yet never encounter; the remaking of works gone by which haunt our present psyche and the environments that find ways to live in unison. Will you join GENERATOR for this Odyssey of land?

Opening: – MARCH 29th 7pm – 9pm
Exhibition:- MARCH 30th – APRIL 21st
Side-events:- Check our website/twitter/facebook for details

Opening Hours:- Thurs – Sunday 12 – 5pm
Or by appointment.

GENERATORprojects
25-26 Mid Wynd
Dundee
DD1 4JG

01382 225982 / mail@generatorprojects.co.uk
www.generatorprojects.co.uk

This is another image from the series, the work is crumpled paper and graphite. The dimensions are 450×707x280mm

I’ve been collecting discarded sandwich wrappers and working with the tinfoil to produce polyliths. This is about 12 cm high.

I’ve been working in the TRS Project Space over the last two weeks. Just me and 30 square meters of blank paper. I also had a smoke machine and some coloured light bulbs, but the most interesting configurations were lit just using sunlight. Fran and I have just watched all three original series of Star Trek and we noticed the alien scenery often just appeared to be just made of scrunched paper made to look like rock and a blue/green/pink lit backdrop. This economy of means but ambition of narrative still appeals to me, and perhaps encouraged me to develop this body of work further beyond the initial experiments using aluminum chippy trays.

As part of Liverpool Art Month and Light Night The Royal Standard transformed into FAVELA,  in which members turned their studios into temporary exhibition spaces.

I thought it would be a great opportunity to try working at a larger scale and made this pentagonal sculpture from tape, cardboard tubes and paper.

Once it was built myself and my wife, Frances Disley, used it to show some of our work together. It was a nice opportunity for me to show some of the work that did not make it into P/N 6: Tomorrow’s World.

FAVELA lasted two days and is now over. The structure remains so I will using it as a place to experiment with playback of the many field recordings I collected over the winter.

I’ve got new work in this show at Project Number in East London.

It’s a great opportunity for Robin Tarbet and I to develop the conversation we initiated during our two person show at Rogue Project Space in Manchester earlier this year.

There’s shared concern with drawing out the aesthetic potential in defunct technologies and the failed dynamism of visions of the future. By extension there’s an attempt to explore the function of ‘progress’ as it manifests itself in the early 21st century.

The new work represents an ‘equalization’ of  my attitude towards technology, how I’m no longer (as) seduced by it and increasing mindful of the material residue of break-neck technological progress. Digital media belongs with rope, paper and wood as part of a extended vocabulary which explores how we interact with our increasingly dematerialized world.

Project Number is curated by Chris Rawcliffe

Come along if you’re in London.

Private View: 18/5/12, 18.00 – 21.00

Project Number,
10 Cazenove Road,
London,
N10 6BD.

Open weekends til 3/6/12 or by appointment

Recorded binaurally at The National Gallery.

“The avant-garde, which has lost itself over time, also pursues the primitive and the archaic. It is in this sense that one can say that the entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archeology; an archeology that does not, however, regress to a historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we are incapable of living.”

Georgio Agamben – What is the Contemporary? from What is Apparatus? Stanford, 2009.

Half Mile Island from Dave Evans on Vimeo.

This film was shot in Skemersdale at what purports to be the largest roundabout in Europe.

Throughout my work these days there is a preoccupation with circularity, a sense of orbiting in the everyday, of being part of cycles within cycles. I don’t mind this, to be part of a cycle is inherently positive, experimentation leads to progress or failure which leads more experimentation which leads to further progress or failure. Individual failure, social failure, global failure, or success and progress, is like the process of walking, a series of small falls, but inevitable forward momentum. The alternative is terrifying.

So I made this film about the largest roundabout in Europe (or the world as some might have it). It was filmed during the winter of 2011/12. I visited many times, took photo’s made sound recordings and recorded a lot of footage. I also researched the history of ‘Skem’ which can be traced all the way back to the Domesday book. Skemersdale was designated a new town in 1961, and had millions of pounds poured into making it a place to house overspill from Liverpool. A new infrastructure was built, famously without any traffic lights and lots of oversize roundabouts. Not as many people moved to Skemersdale as was originally planned and its fortunes have waxed and waned over the decades. This made it doubly interesting as a subject to film, the modernist aspirations for the town, which, thanks to politics, were never quite born out. All that really remains of this utopian vision of the new town is a series of enormous roundabouts and dual carriageways. If you have nowhere to go and don’t mind getting lost, I recommend a drive around.

Also on the roundabout there is a small copse in which teenagers hang out, there was evidence of a fire, beer cans etc. This notion of a round about as an island, a self contained piece of land in which possibilities can be explored, excited me. I spent a lot of time staring out of the window of my parents car as a child, being driven back from my nans along the M53 or whatever,  listening to my walkman. That was prime daydreaming time too. Something of the experience of driving around Skem for hours at a time brought a sense of this back. I listened to science fiction audio books (now, not then) and sci-fi soundtracks as a way of connecting with Skem’s lost future. Clips and samples of these make up the soundtrack of the video.

There’s a pursuit of Deleuze’s ‘Time Image’ in the single take lasting half an hour (quite a while to spend on a roundabout!) During this time, this circular journey, I oscillated between realm of memories and the imagination, the past and the future penetrating the present. It was an enjoyable experience.