May Meet In Mutual, exhibition and events this week.

This week will see the MMIM Micro Residency with Frances Davis, Pauline M. Hynd, David McLeish, Bobby Sayers & Lada Wilson! This two-day residency also includes Sogol Mabadi, Emma Reid & Craig Thomson, who have also developed work for the exhibition over the weekend, the artists will use the time to exchange ideas with other Micro Residents, to research or make works in response to the site and to potentially develop performance, spoken word or screen-based work to be shared at the Open Stage which will take place during the Preview on Friday. The Micro Residency is closed to the public.

On Friday from 3-6pm May Meet In Mutual Open Install leads to the Preview of the exhibition of newly developed site responsive works by Sogol Mabadi, Emma Reid & Craig Thomson. Responding to the situation of the Park Ranger Centre within Baxter Park, the artists share a common interest in boundaries, edges, and the in between and how these affect peoples’ interaction and relations. Mabadi’s sensitive work explores intimacy through a directness of the experience with the audience. Her performances and sculptural work often generate a sense of being at once near the edge of something whilst becoming a part of a shared meeting place. Reid is also interested in relations between people and investigates these through the notion of playfulness or performativity that is often present in our being in the world. Through clever positioning of live-feed cameras and monitors, combined with use of the Park Ranger Centre’s ground to ceiling glass windows, Reid takes the visitor to a place of inquiry whereby their watching, acting and manoeuvring of the space is distorted and revealed to them. Reid also takes her work outside the Park Ranger Centre, temporarily marking the large pillars so that they become an abstract signpost to the event within the space. Thomson’s sculpture underplays the power of the wrought iron fences. Through an exact replica of a portion of the fence made from wood, Thomson transposes the fence into a functional coat rack to be gifted to the Park Ranger Centre after the exhibition.

Sogol Mabadi, The Family, Transmission Gallery, 2014. Photo by Tor Jonsson

Craig Thomson, The Storm, 2014

Emma Reid, hole, video installation, 2014 

Emma Reid, hole, video installation, 2014

Central Station have featured the Event: http://thisiscentralstation.com/featured-event/may-meet-in-mutual/ and will be sharing a guest blog with contributions from the Micro Residents later in the week.

Check out the invitation for more information on the project, including our sponsors: http://eepurl.com/05wh1

OPEN CALL: Micro Residency, 27 & 28 August, Park Centre, Baxter Park, Dundee. Part of May Meet In Mutual

Interested artists (including visual artists, musicians, writers, etc.) are invited to answer an Open Call to take part in a two-day Micro Residency as part of the project May Meet In Mutual based in the Park Centre, Baxter Park, Dundee.

Micro Residency 27 & 28 August:
The two-day Micro Residency is an opportunity to research and/or make work in response to the site and most importantly to share and exchange ideas with others. We seek artists who are interested in considering what can be important/complex/exciting/problematic about site-responsive practice. Micro Residents will be invited to share responses during the Open Stage event on Friday 29 August while an exhibition of works by Sogol Mabadi, Emma Reid & Craig Thomson opens to the public. The Open Stage format will be particularly suited to Micro Residents who intend to focus on performance, text, or video-based work. 

Micro Residents will utilise the Park Centre where desk space and basic materials will be supplied, and lunch will be provided on Wednesday 27 and Thursday 28 August. 

How to Register Interest:
Please complete the MMIM Micro Residency Note Of Interest and submit to maymeetinmutual@gmail.com by 5pm, 12 August 2014. 
The Note Of Interest can be found on our website here: http://maymeetinmutual.com/micro-residency/ 

This project is co-curated by MMIM (Emma Reid & Katie Reid).
With thanks to Maryfield Regeneration Team and the Friends of Baxter Park.
This project is supported by the Kirsten Scott Memorial Trust and IdeasTap.

May Meet In Mutual, Park Centre, Baxter Park, 29-31 August 2014

May Meet In Mutual

An exhibition of site-responsive sculptural and performance work by Sogol Mabadi, Emma Reid & Craig Thomson.

Park Centre, Baxter Park, Dundee
29 – 31 August
Open Install: 29 August, 3-6pmOpen Night with Open Stage: 29 August, 6-9pm
Conversation over Coffee: 30 August, 3-4pm
Exhibition Open: 30 August & 31 August, 10am-4pm

We will soon be announcing an Open Call for Micro Residents during 27 & 28 August! Micro Residents will be invited to produce new site-responsive work to share at Open Stage, which will coincide with the Open Night of May Meet In Mutual exhibition in the Park Centre, Baxter Park, Dundee on Friday 29 August.

This project is co-curated by MMIM (Emma Reid & Katie Reid) and initial project development was informed through conversations with Hannah Moitt.
With thanks to Maryfield Regeneration Team and the Friends of Baxter Park.
This project is supported by the Kirsten Scott Memorial Trust and IdeasTap.

(LIVE) publishing, part of Studio Jamming: Artists' Collaborations in Scotland, Cooper Gallery, DJCAD

(LIVE) publishing continues throughout Studio Jamming: Artists' Collaborations in Scotland in Cooper Gallery annotating, researching and responding to the exhibition and events series that is part of GENERATION this summer's major, nation-wide exhibition programme showcasing some of the best and most significant art to have emerged from Scotland over a period of 25 years and part of the Glasgow 2014 Culture Programme. Co-edited by myself and Sean Scott, (LIVE) publishing collates contributions from a wide group of artists including Morgan Cahn, Katy Christopher, Becca Clark, Cicely Farrer, Lauren Howat, Neele Hruby, Holly Keasey, Steph Liddle, Beth Savage, Tracy Stefanucci, Craig Thomson & Daniel Tyminski to produce digital and screen print issues throughout Studio Jamming.

shift done.

Sunday 22 June saw Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge morph into studio, gallery and library (albeit a noisy one). Morgan Cahn, Becca Clark, Katie Reid, Richard Taylor & Lada Wilson formed new works in response to the site, taking as inspiration the notion that a cafe can be deemed a 'third place' somewhere separate to and other than either 'home' or 'workplace'. 

Lada Wilson, 34words, shift, 22 June 2014

Nothing is a plinth. Everything is a plinth.


Think of this as your gallery!


I'm heartbroken at this news.


Context is everything? Without understanding their situation, these statements become somewhat ambiguous. This is sometimes productive; it allows you to create your own meaning, and even understand your own perspective more so because of it. Lada Wilson's work occupies this space, a place for sharing and uncovering conversation and language through distancing words from sentences.

Lada Wilson, 34words, shift, 22 June 2014

Context is something. The event/exhibition with coffee lounge site and makeshift studio combined transformed my situational installation into an interactive work. Audience members felt the need, the desire, or the lack of preciousness about the work, so that my upturned table with its delicately placed direct-response drawings, the chair carefully aligned with marks on the floor, and sponges placed in part to hide the table's chewing gum, were altered, re-positioned and utilised. The function of a table turned upside down by an artist, was turned upside down again by the visitor.

Katie Reid, Proposal for a Paperweight, shift, 22 June 2014

I'm glad. I am not interested in preciousness. I'm glad that others aren't either. 

Usefulness, on the other hand, is a value I hold dearly and find often intriguing. Becca Clark's sculptural objects positioned around the coffee lounge played with the idea of function versus non-function. Placed in and around the cafe (and without instructions as to their potential abilities) while combining parts and pieces from nails, cocktail sticks, hooks and bobbins, they became something else entirely. 

Within the coffee lounge, Becca also set up a studio space, giving away A Desk With A View a zine made while at her day-to-day workplace, that took on different references within the context of the coffee lounge. The surrounding conversations, at Lada's table, at Morgan's table and around, seeped into Becca's temporary work space. Instead of sitting down, getting in the zone and making new zines, Becca's time was absorbed by discussions.

Becca Clark, A Desk With A View, shift, 22 June 2014

Morgan Cahn's work, or project, also encouraged and centred around conversations with those in the coffee lounge. This was her intention from the outset and Morgan arrived at the coffee lounge with a gigantic hand bound book, encyclopaedias, and posed the question "What do you think is vital knowledge/information for each of us to have?"

Morgan Cahn, What do you think is vital knowledge or information for each of us to have? shift, 22 June 2014

At the end of the afternoon Morgan reported back about some of the factoids and conversations that she'd exchanged. The table was an active site for discussion all afternoon, and as such lots of sharing occurred.

Morgan Cahn, What do you think is vital knowledge or information for each of us to have? shift, 22 June 2014

Richard Taylor developed Work Done a durational performance which saw him give three readings throughout the afternoon from behind the counter amongst a set-up of photographs and grapefruits. After each reading Richard 'clocked out' using his sculpture Tallulah and Gorse and make the walk up The Law Hill and back before the next reading. The readings, photographs, sculpture and a drawing on the door all related to ideas of a journey and as such to perseverance and intent. Auto-biographical elements within the reading added a curious feeling that we were hearing someone learn how to remember or reflect upon their own life, and that through placing these memories amongst new contexts to layer up and conflict could be productive.

Richard Taylor, Work Done, shift, 22 June 2014

Richard Taylor, Work Done, shift, 22 June 2014

Our shift is over. 

You can also read about Lada Wilson's reflections here: http://ladawilson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/shift-fellow-artists.html and http://ladawilson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/shift.html

This project was supported by Dundee Visual Artists Awards and Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge. A publication reflecting upon the project will be published in due course.

shift, 22 June, Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, Stobswell, Dundee

shift, Sunday 22 June, 12.30pm-4.30pm at Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, Albert Street, Dundee, DD4 6QQ View this email in your browser

Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge serves as the temporary site for new works by Morgan Cahn, Becca Clark, Katie Reid, Richard Taylor and Lada Wilson. shift Sunday 22 June, 12.30-4.30pm Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, Albert Street, Dundee Reading with Apparatus by Richard Taylor: 1pm, 2.30pm & 4pm Encounter new works made in response to an understanding of the third place, a place other than or in between ‘home' and ‘workplace'. On 22 June,Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge becomes studio, gallery and library playing host to performance and installation over one Sunday afternoon shift. Questioning how we enact the process of learning, while highlighting the moments of educational exchange that can occur through conversation,Morgan Cahn develops an active and evolving library as she shares and exchanges knowledge with visitors. Katie Reid makes use of what temporarily becomes excess furniture and enlivens the nooks and crannies of Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge. While Becca Clark’s series of small interventions shall occur by way of teeny tiny movable sculptures that assess the value of input and output, action and reaction. We all to and fro. There will also be zines; a medium made for the work/art, art/work, art/life, work/life balance. Lada Wilson invites the audience to take part in a verbal and visual exchange that creates a portrait of time from words and imagination.Richard Taylor presents a small sculpture and a drawing connected by themes expanded upon in a new text read to the audience along with selected photography. The text will be read at 1pm, 2.30pm and 4pm, with each reading slightly edited after Richard journeys repeatedly to the top of Dundee Law hill and back down to the Coffee Lounge to read again. The event is free and all are welcome. Since the Cafe is usually closed on Sundays, Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge will serve a selection of hot drinks rather than their full menu. We hope you can join us to enjoy the works and meet the artists over a coffee. For more information please see our Event webpage. Morgan Cahn is an interdisciplinary artist who has a penchant for scavenging. She creates work that asks people to question their daily routines and interpersonal relationships in this age of disposability. Her site responsive installations and performances encourage interaction through participatory elements and she works in many mediums including film, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, and text, choosing the best form for each project. Originally from Seattle, Morgan lived nearly a decade in Pittsburgh, and now calls Scotland home. Recent projects include, New Scottish Artists, The Fleming Gallery, London, 2014; New Contemporaries, RSA, Edinburgh, 2014, Cupar Arts Festival, 2013 and May Meet in Mutual, Baxter Park Centre, Dundee, 2012. Becca Clark Interested. Thinker. Maker. Investigator. Explorer. Observer. Documenter. Archiver. Learner + Adventurer. Constantly playing with bits and pieces to keep her mind busy, and to output bits and bobs to busy others' minds too. Organiser of the Dundee micro festival, Ickle Film Fest. Committee member of Art Label Yuck 'n Yum, leading the annual zine fair project. One half of the collective RBBC. A third of the collective Pitch + Strike. Katie Reid works site responsively often making projects that investigate our judgement of value. She is frustrated by the systems and structures that normalise and support Capitalist ways of thinking. Katie's ideas and projects are developed through conversation, encouraging investment in the moments that occur to work with exchanging an economy of ideas. Recent projects include, Camperdown Conversations with Beth Savage, Dundee, 2013; May Meet in Mutual, Baxter Park Centre, Dundee, 2012, as well as workshops Student Curatorial Team: Working through Ideas with Sean Scott, 2014, and Student Curatorial Team: Currency of Ideaswith Holly Knox Yeoman, 2012. Richard Taylor is an artist based in Edinburgh. Alongside other interdisciplinary work his practice confronts the ability text has to record and transform experience, leading to published works and live readings with apparatus. Recent projects include Scree Magazine Presents, The Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh; The Hidden Door Festival 2014 (with Totes Colo Collective); PerformingNOW, Generator Projects, Dundee; Epigone, Basement Arts Project, Leeds;Gnommero Visibility, co-edited artists journal and launch, CCA, Glasgow and 'COLLIDER', Mexico Project Space, Leeds (part of Embassy's Residency Exchange 2013). Croatian-born Dutch artist and curator Lada Wilson made her home in Scotland after having lived in a number of countries. She is currently studying towards a Masters of Fine Art, Art Society & Publics at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee. In her art practice, Lada transforms words from different languages into objets trouvés that lead to participatory events. Recent projects include a series of projects for the Matthew Cabinet Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee from 2013-2014 entitled interAction(s), and PerformingNow, Generator Projects, Dundee, 2013. Image: Morgan Cahn, Richard Taylor and Lada Wilson Take Notes at Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, 2014. Photo: Katie Reid.

With thanks to Dundee Visual Artists Awards through Leisure & Culture Dundee City Council with Creative Scotland and of course, Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge for their support. Copyright © 2014 Katie Reid, All rights reserved.

shift SHIFT shift SHIFT shift

Enjoy…! Coffee Lounge, 44-46 Albert Street, Dundee, serves as the temporary site for new works by Morgan Cahn, Becca Clark, Katie Reid, Richard Taylor and Lada Wilson on 22 June, 12.30-4.30pm.

Made in response to an understanding of the third place, a place other than or in between ‘home' and ‘workplace', the Coffee Lounge becomes studio, gallery and library hosting performance and installation over one Sunday afternoon.

For shift, I will make new works responding to what becomes the excess furniture and nooks and crannies of Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge.

What's going to shift from useful furniture to excess, and where the nooks and crannies will be, is partially to be determined. Though through making the arrangements with the Coffee Lounge owners and inviting the other artists to contribute, I have an overall idea of how their new works might fit together and I'm intrigued to see how I can extend the practical/facilitating role I am taking to make an installation. That work will also aim to function to create a more suitable space for the project, and I wonder how this will affect the reading of it as a 'work'.

shift - site visit, Enjoy...! Coffee Lounge, Dundee.

shift is shaping up.

Site visit extraordinaire today with three of the artists contributing to shift meeting me for americanos at Enjoy...! Coffee Lounge - that third place between home and work.

Morgan Cahn, Richard Taylor, Lada Wilson. NOTE-shift at Enjoy...! Coffee Lounge

Talking ensued. Some performed a meeting, sitting straight, diligently taking notes. Others transcribed their own thoughts as the site influenced plans for their work. Tables were pointed at and re-arranged in our mind's eye - yes, a singular mind's eye, shared by the four of us as we discussed shift.

Morgan Cahn's table became clothed in drawing after the ceiling lights presented to her a twisted network of highlights like a mind-map and sparked new ideas for how she would install her work.

Richard Taylor spoke of Work Done; he's already begun, much more to come. See his twitter for some photographs - one of which might appear in the Coffee Lounge in June as part of an installation to include performative readings.

We opened the blinds at our window table and looked out to the dis-used door space where Lada Wilson's 47 Words might appear as part of her inside/outside installation.

Enjoy...! Coffee Lounge, 44-46 Albert Street, Dundee.

Our conversations concluded and the artists journeyed west from Stobswell. Called over by Enjoy...! owners, Aziz and Lawra, I stayed behind and, notebook out at the ready, we three sketched a timeline for 22 June.

shift is coming soon at Enjoy...! Coffee Lounge, 44-46 Albert Street, Dundee. Put a note for 22 June, 12.30-4.30pm in your diary/notebook/a napkin/etc.

shift; (LIVE) publishing; Park Centre

Projects are brewing.
Spring is a fitting time to be thinking about what's next.
Bad good things come in threes.


shift will occupy Enjoy...! Coffee Lounge on Albert Street, Dundee, for one afternoon on Sunday 22 June.
Through an expanded notion of reading - reading works, reading spaces, reading books, reading aloud - a currency of ideas will be shared with visitors during an afternoon punctuated by performative moments. Setting aside time for quiet contemplation of the artists' works, this group exhibition ponders; if a cafe is a 'third place' between home and work, what is a coffee lounge taken over by artworks?

(LIVE) publishing, a project co-edited by myself and Sean Scott, will run throughout Cooper Gallery's Studio Jamming: Artists' Collaborations in Scotland's exhibition and event series, which highlights the vibrant and distinctive practice of collaborative groups such as GANGHUT, Graham Fagen & Graham Eatough, Full Eye and Henry VIII's Wives. 

(LIVE) publishing will produce regular publications that annotate and reflect upon the Studio Jamming project through digital and screen printing, creating a series of editions in reaction to the project to construct an instant record, of sorts.

Studio Jamming: Artists' Collaborations in Scotland, Cooper Gallery, 28 June - 2 August

Emma Reid and I are working towards an exhibition and events series to be held at Baxter Park's glass walled Park Centre towards the end of summer.
Framed by the site, this project engages with the poetic, utopian, and somewhat disquieting phrase, 'may meet in mutual' as declared by Sir David Baxter on the opening of the park in 1863, which he used to describe his intention that Dundee's population would meet in mutual recognition of their interdependence. The utopian perspective of this comment and the Park Centre's glass walls have inspired a transparent and democratic approach - we are experimenting with an 'open source' model of curatorial/artistic practice, attempting to uncover what this could mean. Perhaps it suggests that the process leading up to the project is widely opened up to audiences, or just the group of artists? Maybe the exhibition/public presence of the project will provide the 'source code' for a future project? Or will the online manifestation play its own distinct role?

Let's say 'tbc' for now.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz - Post Military Cinema - Transmission Gallery

The poetic and slightly disturbing visions in Transmission Gallery's Post-Military Cinema by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, staged as part of Glasgow International 2014, remain within me now two weeks on. Santiago Muñoz's three screen projection permeates through the upper gallery space presenting a cross-referencing abstracted narrative of the ruins of Roosevelt Roads, a US Naval Base no longer operational on the coastal Puerto Rican town Ceiba. Santiago Muñoz presents carefully crafted shots of lizards scuttling across empty concrete spaces, shots of trees over-running what once would have been a controlled area, and we follow Pedro Ortiz Pedraza who we're told is a teacher and theatre actor, as well as a member of one of the families that was evicted from the land decades ago by the navy, through the forest as he makes a plea to the orishas 'give my enemies eyes with which to see so that they might not take mine out'. 


On the surface these films tell the story of an abandoned space, but Santiago Muñoz highlights the events that remain. Santiago Munoz records the light that shines into the old cinema space for up to an hour each day projects its own moving images of the growing trees moving outside. Downstairs, light and destruction again stamp their creative voice, this time through a 35mm film found in Ceiba's cinema and now projected as slides in Gallery 2; the original images faded and re-made by rain, heat and light. A vinyl record produced with recordings from both Peurto Rico and Scotland accompanies the exhibition, you can hear it downstairs interacting with the whir of the carousel slide projector, the sounds of still operating military base Faslane accompany recordings from Ceiba, and the newly opened airport at the site.


Post Military Cinema deconstructs a situation using methodologies intrinsic to cinema/film/sight. The works collectively present a new space for reflection on what this site meant and what it could become now, perceived individually they would inform and reshape our understanding of cinematography. Perhaps in part because of Santiago Muñoz’s six-week residency at Transmission in 2013 the works make sense of the gallery spaces. The exhibition is curated so that the relationship between works and the delicate frustration you feel while intently watching one screen yet entirely missing the projection directly behind you and still only stealing glances of the refracted sun rays and seascapes in the next closest projection, becomes analogous to an exploration of the site itself. Perhaps this also suggests the frustration implicit in this type of film making, for attempting to record these fleeting moments before the next 'event' occurs and changes them entirely must be an on-going process of consideration, judgement and patience.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz - Post Military Cinema at Transmission Gallery continues until 22 May 2014. More information: http://www.transmissiongallery.org

Currently working on...

SHIFT

As of now.

Currently working as...

So, my last post said I would start working on SHIFT and leave Exhibitions DJCAD in September, however the plan changed a lot and in fact I stayed full-time until, well, yesterday! Now I'm on a new part-time contract I'll have more time to focus on projects of my own while still working on the fantastic exhibitions we have coming up with Exhibitions DJCAD.

It was wonderful to work through the full cycle of Georgina Starr's Before Le Cerveau Affamé - the Opening Ceremony Performance, the exhibition, the production of a new artist's book, and the Salon of the Voice created a complex and mysterious world that fed our 'hungry brains' with Starr's own tarot system, bubble gum brains, ceramic cats, surreal film and French poetry.

Naiza Khan's Disrupting the Alignment opens today, a filmic installation that takes the structures, geography and stories of Manora Island off the coast of Pakistan as a point for exploration of the social, economic complexities at play in contemporary Pakistan.