Artists 13

Bobby Abate (USA) makes films and videos that fuse nostalgia, psychodrama, and spectacle with a distinctly modern resonance. His recent work, the occult themed Love Rose (2010) and Gossip (2011) premiered at the New York Film Festival and his 1960's era supernatural drama The Evil Eyes (2011) won autFILM Award for Best LGBT Film at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Other exhibitions and screenings include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Moscow International Film Festival, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the ICA in London and Palm Beach. Critics celebrated his underground feature Certain Women co-directed with Peggy Ahwesh; and MOMA called the film "as sustained and as successful as Todd Haynes' acclaimed Far From Heaven" with an "almost opposite approach." Film Comment Magazine named Bobby one of the top 25 emerging Filmmakers for the 21st Century. Among other accolades, he is also the recipient of the Princess Grace Award. He is currently working on his first mainstream feature Dressed in Black with Damsels in Distress co-producer Charlie Dibe.

The Evil Eyes (2011) An homage to the death of the soap opera.

Set in the 1960's, The Evil Eyes is the story of a grandmother faced with her mortality, a mother in mid-life crisis, and a son realizing his sexuality - a dysfunctional family whose unspoken angst manifests in the latest episode of their beloved supernatural soap opera, Before Dawn.

Following on from the experience of writing about colour for Intense Colour Movement at last year's blinc,  and excited by the relationship between verbal and visual art forms, Elizabeth is creating  new poems in response to  visual/digital art.  
Her intention is not to illustrate the art piece, or to discover re-present  a narrative, but  to bridge the divergent disciplines.  She hopes to translate the  emotional content and immediacy of the colour and form of a piece into a corresponding  text:  image as poem. 
Elizabeth is currently working on an ACW- funded project, ‘Painting the Poem’.

Darren Banks (UK) incorporates found and made film footage into sculpture and installation to explore ideas about domesticity, defunct technologies, cinema and the unknown. The work questions the perception of sculpture in relation to objects, film and memory.

Banks is interested in the possibility of film as sculpture. Within his practice sculpture is not just confined to three dimensions, but can exist on and within different platforms and plateaus. As a horror film fanatic he’s intrigued by the aesthetic and structural devices used within the genre. Banks’ reworks the formal vocabularies of horror by isolating its tropes, use of montage and architecture.
Banks’ uses film by embedding it into sculptural assemblages. He believes in the neutrality between different objects, media and materials. For example, he uses film/video/internet in the same way as a piece of string or an ironing board. Accepting that film/video exists on the same plane as direct experience gives it equal footing in the world. Being open to this neutrality between objects, materials and media enables the work to escape the confines of the physical; creating new spaces within the work, where gravity is optional and objects and characters can take on new meaning through the processes of deconstruction and reconfiguring.

Mike Bowen is an American Digital Artist.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
I exist as an artist to connect the spiritual world with the physical world. Every line, color, sound and light projection seeks to find and reveal the inner truth of our existense on this earth. My dreams at night are as real as waking life. Art acts as the bridge to the sub-conscious and inner most being I try to make sense of in this 3rd dimension. I’ve always created deep spiritual art with a purpose. I hope to expose truth of being and when a viewers eyes connect with my art i hope they have an opening of heart and mind.

BIO:
Since 2001, he has displayed works and installations in various shows and galleries in the Tampa Bay area. He and his wife produced the visionary 11:11 art event which brought Alex Grey to the area in 2009. His company, Bowen Imagery, provides high-end graphics, illustration and creative retouching. Catering to companies large and small, national and local, Bowen Imagery’s clientele include Mercedes-Benz, Donna Eden and Panache Desai.

http://http://bowenimagery.com
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Artist: Joel Cockrill & + ffloc

Light Bridge

‘Light Bridge’ responds to the surrounding ferrous architecture, via a superimposed architecture of light. The piece is formed using two pairs high intensity lasers positioned on the west and east banks of the Conwy River, and features contributions by artists Marc Rees and Bedwyr Williams, Alfredo Cramerotti - Director Mostyn Llandudno, Ken Rimmer (oldest mussel fisherman in Conwy) and the communities of Conwy and Deganwy.

This new structure examines the underlying elements and design used in the span of Thomas Telford’s road bridge over the Conwy River, and generates a contemporary expression connecting the two opposing river frontages.

Telford’s bridge was one of the first of its kind anywhere in the world and used new technology, thinking and processes in its creation. Underlying its construction were the repeated elements of: link, lattice and rod. Against these essential engineering features, Telford superimposed artistic embellishments and motifs on the structure, playful references to the surrounding architecture, reflecting the intention that his bridge should ‘sit’ harmoniously within the space.

‘Light Bridge’ refers to these construction and architectural elements and reinterprets them in light.

Aside from the obvious connotations of the piece as being a modern statement of how ‘traffic’ is now primarily transmitted by the optic fibre of the internet, whereas in Telford’s place in the industrial revolution, ‘traffic’ was the physical movement of goods, people and ideas; the work also plays with the idea of the ‘impossible bridge’ – it spans the space, but you cannot cross, although you share the experience with viewers on the opposite side of the river.

Artists and members of the community on each side of the river have contributed words, thoughts, feelings that they want to share across the space, using the bridge as a connecting force.

These words will be simultaneously transmitted by the lasers pairs on each river bank, each one only visible to the distant viewer, creating an unconsciously shared experience.

Neil Coombs is a multimedia artist and writer based in Wales. His work is informed by surrealism and, as such, deals with explorations of the marvellous manifested in the everyday. He has exhibited photographic, installation and multimedia work in galleries and at festivals both nationally and internationally. His work was recently included in group shows in Turkey, Germany and USA. Coombs is founder and editor of the surrealist journal Patricide.

Neil returns to blinc this year with a work inspired by Georges Bataille’s novella ‘Story of the Eye".

Dymphna is a performer/film maker and writer based in Conwy
Reference to time, place, and motion and the unconscious shards of history that influence the way we respond to a certain place are recurring themes in her work Central to her practice is the transformative quality of time and the consequential effects of time on place, exploring the intersection between time place and motion and the idea of the past present and future as a co-dependent continuous entity. Dymphna is current working on an ACW R&D grant about island environments

Since graduating from Derby University Seth has continued to experiment and explore a plethora of different digital media techniques. He is constantly exploring new approaches to vjing and audio-visual projections. Using the camera as a social instrument to look and learn and record life’s unique experiences. He analyses the ebb and flow of human behaviour and surveys the world as it drifts by.  Seth is a cross-platform specialist and digital media tutor and enjoys vjing. Working with digital technology enables him to examine the manner by which light shadow and perspective can be blended and manipulated creatively.

Wendy is a sculptor and digital artist living in North Wales, inspired by the human urge to invent, time and our fascination with the world around us. Her piece 'Obscura' is a lens made from ice, and as a Camera Obscura captures the world for a moment so does the ice lens, continually changing and moving, a moment of time that is described by light and then gone. It is as much about the object as it is about the light. This year her 3D projection entitled SWARM will also be on display, commissioned for last year's Blinc festival, exploring ideas about the collective 'intelligence' of simple lifeforms/programs, and Conwy’s historic association with beekeeping.

Ronan Devlin will be showing is 2012 piece again this year, but this time on the Chapel. The work is hypnotic and vibrant and is concerned with Aftermage. An afterimage is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one's vision after exposure to the original image has ceased.
This work has a soundtrack by David J Knowles

Menna Elfyn has published thirteen collections of poetry, children’s novels, libretti for UK and US composers as well as plays for television and radio. Her most recent collection in Welsh is Merch Perygl from Gomer Press in 2011 and her bilingual volume Murmur was published by Bloodaxe Books, in autumn 2012. This volume was selected by Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, the first ever book of Welsh poetry in English translation to be chosen. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages for which she received an International Foreign Poetry Prize in 2009 in Sardinia. A columnist with the ‘Western Mail’ since 1994 , she is also Director of Creative Writing at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. She was made Poet Laureate for the Children of Wales in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Europe Poetry prize for women poets.

Ganed Menna Elfyn yng Nghwm Tawe ond treuliodd y rhan helaethaf o’i bywyd yn Nyfed. Cafodd radd yn y Gymraeg ac yna Ddoethuriaeth o Brifysgol Cymru, Y Drindod Dewi Sant lle y mae’n Gyfarwyddwr Ysgrifennu Creadigol. Cyhoeddodd ddwsin o lyfrau o farddoniaeth, hefyd nofelau i blant, libreti at gyfer cyfansoddwyr yng Nghymru ac yn yr Unol Daleithiau yn ogystal ag ysgrifennu dramâu ar gyfer radio a theledu. Ei chyfrolau diweddaraf yw Merch Perygl ( Gomer, 2011) a Murmur ( Bloodaxe Books, 2012) a chafodd y gyfrol ddwyieithog ei dewis gan Gymdeithas Lyfrau ar Farddoniaeth gan ennill cymeradwyaeth a chlod ar gyfer 2012. Mae ei gwaith wedi ei gyfieithu i ddeunaw o ieithoedd a derbyniodd Wobr Ryngwladol yn 2009 am y gwaith hwnnw. Mae’n golofnydd gyda’r ‘Western Mail’ er 1994 ac wedi cyd-weithio gyda nifer o artistiaid yng Nghymru a thu hwnt.

Tessa Garland (UK) “I originally trained as a sculptor but for many years my work has been preoccupied with the moving image. Cinematic language allows me to explore and create places by piecing and layering together footage of journeys through spaces. I tend of focus on a place, landmark or idea and work with it over a long period of time, allowing it to grow in significance. I often build scale models to help me to understand and focus on my subjects, this preparatory work is filmed and reworked digitally to create short inserts that are collaged and layered together. Sound is vital to the work and once meshed with the imagery form atmospheric, often dreamlike work that is reminiscent of a memory or a premonition.

Science Fiction influences my practice, particularly films from the 1950's and 60's where the construction of the film making process is evident. I enjoy adapting low budget techniques drawn from this genre and use such devices in an exaggerated way to evoke a heightened sense of unease or suspense.

Katie Goodwin (UK) ‘I have been described as a cinematic magpie. Most of my source material is gleaned from the cutting room floor of the film production process. I seek to reveal the stuff that the audience never sees, reprocessing and exposing moments that would otherwise be lost forever. Recycling waste and celebrating hidden labour are persistent intentions in my practice. Rescuing a moment or object and reanimating it is a form of bringing it alive - a kind of memento vivere. As my practice develops the found footage is more widely sourced from the scientist’s laboratory or amateur filmmaker’s attic or a chance junk market find from the anonymous auteur, but continues to explore the fetishisation and tangibility of a rare and unseen object.

For example, in A Space Odyssey Omit (1968/2011). a single celluloid frame that did not make the final cut from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey is reanimated into an almost animated painting. The frame morphs into a silent bodily landscape, undulating slowly and seamlessly in a large, looped video projection. In Film Fan (1963-1983/2012), a collaboration with Alex March, we sourced Super 8 footage from markets and junk shops and made a film showing a microcosm of 1960s to 1980s British family life.

As celluloid succumbs to the pixel, the endless bombardment of images upon the viewer seems ever more intense. Each blockbuster movie boasts to be bigger, faster and more explosive than the last. I attempt to use the tools and language of 21st century cinema to expose that which has not been seen before and try to seduce the viewer with an alternate view. Slowness and dust and marks are persistent motifs in my work. As the digital and dematerialised world progresses, I search through the analogue graveyard and collect snippets left behind worthy of a second look.

Current projects include Small Wonders a film made from recordings in conversation with a microbiologist and his image archive including a 16mm film of a cutting edge experiment shot through a microscope in 1972. This project will be projected in stereo 3D and use surround sound. My work maybe moving away from its cinematic sources but I continue to use cinematic language to explore lost memories; ownership; the anonymous auteur; the creative drive; speed or lack of it; death and what we leave behind.”

Alys Hughes and Elly Strigner are North Wales artists, local to the area of Conwy, working in dance / physical performance and animation / moving image respectively. Following on from last year's performance at Blinc, 'Hiraeth', a piece about longing, which combined live dance, soundscape, music, and animation, this year they will collaborate again to create a performance which aims to highlight the importance of Welsh culture, language and expression.

Alys is trained in middle eastern and flamenco dance. She is very interested in how dance is part of our everyday lives and can be used to express emotions and learn about the space and the environments we inhabit.

Last year she performed live and was projected 15m high on the Castle walls.

Craig Morrison, Artist and co-curator of blinc13, will be exhibiting his piece, Green Bay at this years blinc Digital Arts Festival in North Wales, on the eve of Dylan Thomas’s birth, kicking off the year long Dylan Thomas Centenary.

The piece is inspired by Dylan Thomas’s “ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and features a very poignant installation, the writing of Dylan Thomas, the contemporary poetry of Menna Elfyn and Elizabeth Ashworth and accompanied by a 50ft High projection of Sir Anthony Hopkins reading the poem on Conwy Castle walls.

Craig wanted to mark the eve of Dylan Thomas’s birth with a piece of work that highlights the cyclical nature of life and death and the effects that loosing a loved one has. Dylan Thomas wrote Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night in response to his own father’s decline.

Craig is a co-curator of blinc

Kika Nicolela (Zurich / São Paulo) is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator. Her works include single-channel videos, installations, performances, experimental documentaries and photography. Graduated in Film and Video by the University of Sao Paulo, Kika Nicolela also completed film courses at UCLA University and is currently doing a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK).

She has participated of over 100 solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK and US. The artist was the recipient of several prominent Brazilian grants and awards, including the 2012 Award to Visual Arts Project by São Paulo Arts Council in 2012 and 2006, 2011 FUNARTE Contemporary Art Award, 2011 Piracicaba Art Salon Acquisition Award, 2010 Exhibition Abroad Award by the Biennale Foundation and the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, 2007 Production Grant by the Recife Arts Week and the 2006 Exhibition Grant by the São Paulo Cultural Center.

Her videos have been screened and awarded in festivals of more than 30 countries, such as: Kunst Film Biennale, Milan International Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Bilbao International Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Videoformes New Media & Video Art Festival and International Electronic Art Festival Videobrasil.

"Outcasting started as an online moving image gallery in 2007 by artist Michael Cousin. Based in Cardiff, this is an organisation that offers an international platform for experimental practitioners. Now in its sixth year it will be looking at representing new media practice in any form, audio, digital imagery and web-based projects as well as moving image practice.
Outcasting aims to present exciting work in online and offline venues, support the production and distribution of work through new commissions and distribution networks plus represent moving image talent on an individual basis. Outcasting also assists artists in production of new work."

I am currently immersed in Laugharne, West Wales researching a new site specific project for National Theatre Wales entitled 'Raw Material : Llareggub revisited', a re-imagining of Dylan Thomas' play for voices 'Under Milk Wood'. Thomas described the Carmarthenshire township as ' the strangest place in Wales' and with its castle 'brown as owls' and its contemporary colourful characters it still is. Therefore in order to select the words for the 'Light Bridge it seemed appropriate to dive into Thomas's visceral world of verse '. So, with a view of the sun shimmering off the estuary and the cry of a distant curlew I selected three that I felt resonated with both places. They are Surrender, Blood and Stones.

John Rowley (Wales) has worked as an artist and an actor for the past 20 years. He makes work across a wide range of media including theatre, performance, film, sculpture and illustration. Reared in Essex, he has now been resident in Wales since 1990, initially working for the renowned site-specific theatre company, BRITH GOF. In addition to his solo practice he also makes art and performance works with colleague, Richard Huw Morgan as part of good cop bad cop and is an associate performer with the Sheffield-based experimental performance group, Forced Entertainment. In the summer of 2012 he was cast in a National Theatre of Wales’ production of Coriolanus and is about to develop his second children’s book for a well known publisher.

The Dark Sounds For A City (2004) series of films form part of a larger body of live performance and lens-based works, inspired by 1970’s and 80‘s BBC Sound Effects LPs (on vinyl and in mono, for amateurs). Commissioned by BBC Wales as part of Mad, Bad & Dangerous, its ‘artists-make-films-for-tv-transmission’ scheme, the intention was to create a number of micro-length narrative ‘dramas’ to be screened in the gaps between the channel’s scheduled programming.The results appear as incidents that could be seen to have been lifted from part of a larger project, at a point immediately ‘post-impact’, where we can only guess at what has been and what will potentially follow.

These films were some of the earliest shot on HD by BBC Wales (although never screened in HD) by Bafta Award Winning cinematographer, Rob Hardy.

Ruaidhri Ryan (London) is currently studying a postgradu- ate degree at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, he has exhibited nationally and internationally in film festivals, television and galleries.
Predominantly working with film & video, but occasionally designing clothes and furniture, Ruaidhri observes ‘perpetual longing and dissapointment’ through a deconstruction of cinema and images, of people and place.

My Cheap Tracking Shot (2011) acts as a humorous critique on DIY movie making and reveals such methods of movie production. Utilizing PVC waste pipe, wooden planks and other materials readily available in hardware stores a camera track and dolly were produced. The video documents two men replacing the previously expended track behind the camera dolly so that the tracking shot can continue to record the entire interior.

Tom Senior is a recent graduate of The Royal College of Art. His piece, Sunday Morning is a delicate animation, that will be shown at blinc for the first time.

Chris Squire With roots in both the performing and the visual arts, Chris now works at the Venn diagram-like interface between participatory events, new technologies and installation art. Chris is director of Impossible (www.impossible.org.uk) based at the Watershed, a converted arts mill near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, and works with artists from a range of disciplines. The work combines participatory, digital, live and visual arts in producing a series of innovative projects that can take place in a shopping centre more often than an arts centre. Recent projects have happened on a cliff top, in a classroom, on a shopping precinct and in a railway station. The interest lies in "mixing the technological with the lyrical to intrigue and involve people from the widest range of different backgrounds". If you ask what he does for a living he might reply "I enjoy solving problems with materials and locations as much as finding solutions to creative challenges when involving people in artworks" adding "but you try explaining that when an insurance agent asks for ‘Occupation?’" CODEX Before the invention of printing all books were hand-written. The most luxurious manuscripts, laboriously crafted in many world cultures over a 1,000 year period, were lit up by decoration and pictures to create dazzling and intriguing objects. The CODEX installation is inspired by these Illuminated Manuscripts, like them it combines bespoke words and image, but now made as an open book lit up in the night sky. Our Codex is being hand coded to combine the two elements: special illustrations that the audience can control through a 3-D camera, together with live poetry fragments and (we hope) Twitter texts.

Alys Hughes and Elly Strigner are North Wales artists, local to the area of Conwy, working in dance / physical performance and animation / moving image respectively. Following on from last year's performance at Blinc, 'Hiraeth', a piece about longing, which combined live dance, soundscape, music, and animation, this year they will collaborate again to create a performance which aims to highlight the importance of Welsh culture, language and expression.

Sharon is an emerging visual artist within Wales. After a previous period of R&D funded by the ACW, she has now started to develop a new strand of work exploring the link between two forms of dance and art. Using light art she explores how the two forms overlap and fuse together in the same space and time. The highlighted dancers and light pathways narrate movement cutting through space. By using long exposures she is able to capture one moment in time, extend and stretch that moment to create a sense of past, present and future.

The photograph features artists from Ballet Cymru
Digital Artwork by Sharon Teear

Special thanks to:
Two professional ballet dancers from Ballet Cymru (Lydia Arnoux and Daisuke Miura)- for performance and choreographic work.
Paul Davies (solo contemporary professional dancer)- for performance and choreographic work.
John Campbell (Room of light Productions) -for video editing and motion graphics
Craig Allen- for music production
Elin Withey- Model
Rubicon Dance and The Riverfront Theatre for provision of studio space to create the work.

Rhys Trimble is a bilingual poet and performer based in Bethesda interested in medieval welsh praise poetry such as the cywyddwyr as part of an overall passion for the avant garde and linguistic experimentation - This year Rhys is using the bardic staff pastwn beats to activate digital media such as projection and recording in a live performance of an action/reaction cyberpoem assisting by the technological innovator Zack De Santos.

Sean is an artist based in West Wales; his work deals with ideas of ‘landscape’ and our increasingly politicised interaction with the ‘natural’ world, often making use of animation and found objects to suggest a wider narrative.

Steve Knight is a software developer based in Pembrokeshire.
Steve’s background in communications software and interactive systems development fused with Sean’s fine art practice enables them to generate compelling imagery across a wide range of media.

They will be collaborating on a new work for Blinc 2013 inspired by the origins of birdwatching and current developments in surveillance technology.

I first became interested in animation while working towards my BA in Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Working heavily with 3D modelling I designed buildings which were intended to be experienced as cinematic sequences and exhibited strong use of narrative structure in their layout. Following my BA I worked as a volunteer artist on Bassam Kurdali’s ‘Tube’ project in the BitFilms incubator lab at Hampshire College, Northampton, Massachusetts. There I focussed primarily on model and set design as well as being involved in special effects programming.

Alan Whitfield is a Digital Artist and Poet. His work is engrained in his Northern working class upbringing. His works responds to social commentary and documentation of surroundings. Alan returns to Blinc for a third year in his evolution as a local digital Artist. This years work interrogates the spaces that are around us in everyday life that while we may feel part of them we are unable to brake there inner sanctity and evolve any further connections with. Alan aims to engage the viewer with his 'look but don't touch' installation