Tou Works 2

Curators: Kenneth Varpe (NO) and Dallas Seitz (CA). Period: 15 - 30 NOV 2008, Beer Halls.

A common denominator for the pieces of works presented in TW2, is that they have all been influenced by the meetings between the artists and the process shared.

If widening the concept of site, I consider them all to accommodate a degree of site-specificity in the sense that they relate to either the physicality of the beer halls, or in some ways have embedded topographic and/or cultural elements from Stavanger/Norway within them.
The works have all been realised during the period between the first worklab (September) and the second and final worklab in November. Consequences of this method is that there are a number of subtle references between the works, some pieces exist as collaborations between artists, and some pieces merely employ the other artists as components.

Throughout them all there are referrings back to the group´s initial discussions on deviation. Although not apparent at first glance, this may be gradually unveiled when concidered along (or juxtaposed with), notions of evolution, generation, direction, linearity and also grander dichotomies like beginning and end, the individual and the collective, and life and death.

This have been treated with humour, nostalgia, melancholy and sincerety through a range of formats and media; video, sound, drawing, object and installation.

Kenneth Varpe

Dallas Seitz´s work takes many forms utilizing video, sculpture, photography and drawing. Conceptual in its approach Seitz points to the museum or exhibition space as a place of collecting, research, colonization and memory both personal and political.

For TW2 new works were realized using Norway as a starting point. Objects found in thrift-shops in Stavanger are combined with photographs from glacial drops to become artifacts relating to small museum Dioramas.
A head of an iceman is recreated from a national geographic picture similar to iceman bodies found through these glacial movements like the objects in thrift shops take on artifact status purely through their journey and age.
A video collaboration with The Miller McAfee Press "Sea Monkeys and Mermaids" hints at mythical creatures, museums of mankind and Darwinian theory.

whatsthebigmistry has created an installation where she conciders the architecture, the capacity of the materials of its construction, its functionality and all its features and quirks.
She invites the viewer to orientate themselves through the space, where they might undergo discoveries, a change in perspective. The objects arrangement will shift in their relationship to each other, in turn the viewers relationship to the space will also shift. The installation tells an abstract story, a story with many endings, diverging routes, not ending.
The ideas that underpin the work lye between scientific rational, theology, philosophy and myth, from evolutionary theory to Eve and the apple to fairytales with not so happy ending, fairytales with harsh consequence.

Kenneth Varpe de- and reconstructs personal memories, his own and others to raise questions of how stories are created and maintained, affected or unaffected by others.
A videopiece show the faces of the other artists in the group slowly morphing into eachother, creating an illusion of one person altering features, gender and age. This is accompanied by the soundtrack of each person describing a photograph of themselves, causing them to shift between being the subject and object.
In the other piece an old polaroid of the artist as a five-year old boy in his mothers national-costume dress is juxtaposed with his fathers wrench, which is sown into and sealed by the fabric and beeds used in the dress.

Galen Riley creates a scenery of objects that she puts in to her space, trees, ropes and potatoes. The ropes are anti-gravity and inviting suicide. A branchless tree In Jungian terms suggests no future but optimistically here they offer no branches from which the death rope can hang. The whole installation could be taken physically, or have a physical impact. There is the physical effort of counting and moving 4444 potatoes, there are five trees, five ropes, each tree has five clipped branches, like five fingers or four limbs plus a head. They appear to have the weight and presence of elephant legs, who never forget. The ropes are knotted to do with remembering. The ropes spring, the trees hang, the potatoes pile, creating a sculptural landscape.

Robert Johanssons work responds to the space, where he has been scratching, sand papering, rubbing, drawing, and waxing the walls and ceiling as if to bring out pictures from them, following traces already there and exaggerating features.
The images take on situations and relations, loosely and yet tightly bound together, like memories, relationships of all kinds, dreams and situations. They draw their stems from personal experiences of TW2, nature, beliefs, sport stars, old family photos before my time and Tongan democratic protests blended with meandering phantasies and material tests in correspondence with the room.

The Miller and McAfee Press are presenting two new audio pieces and one collaboration with Dallas Seitz. For their first piece a song was selected by the artists, who cannot read or speak Norwegian, from a book of old Norse folk songs found in a Stavanger charity shop, Their performance of the song begins with one voice that sings with uncertainty and stumbles over notes and pronunciations. As other voices join in and repeat the refrain, mistakes are in some places reinforced, in others ironed out, until a strong and coherent chorus can be heard. The evolution of the song echoes the evolution of a culture, in which deviations become mainstream, or are otherwise suppressed.
In their second piece The Miller and McAfee Press were struck by the Norwegian trait of saying “yes” on the in-breath, and how similar this can sound to the English speaker’s sharp intake of breath to signal alarm. The work is sung on the in-breath, with the singers clearly exhaling between notes.
For the collaboration with Seitz they produced the soundtrack for Sea Monkeys and Mermaids a video work featured in his installation for TW2. The sound was made using a synthesised sample of vinyl record static. The needle moving through the groove of a record, a metaphor for a glacier carving through the landscape. Successive generations of this sample were digitally distorted to produce cracking, grating and grinding that echoes through the space like a slowly shifting ice-sheet

Kenneth Varpe