Trajectory, Oriel Davies Gallery

Trajectory, In Focus Space, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown Powys, Wales (March 31 - May 19, 2007)
This performance / installation took place over the first two days of the exhibition. The trajectory in question involved an initial drawing of a crumpled ball of paper drawn from imagination, then crushed and dropped on the floor, where it was then used as a model for a subsequent drawing. This picture, upon completion, was crushed in turn and used for the next. This process continued for the duration of the opening, effectively building a sculptural installion out of a series of drawings.

Trajectory, Porch Gallery

Trajectory, Porch Gallery, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester (December 8 -10, 2006)

This performance / installation took place on the opening night of the exhibition and consisted of myself, in the very particular dimensions of Porch Gallery's exhibition space, drawing and discarding a number of pictures. The trajectory in question involved an initial drawing of a crumpled ball of paper drawn from imagination, then crushed and dropped on the floor, where it was then used as a model for a subsequent drawing. This picture, upon completion, was crushed in turn and used for the next. This process continued for the duration of the opening, effectively building a sculptural installion out of a series of drawings.

photograph: Elina Chauveaux

Free Press: Sal Randolph, Röda Sten

Free Press, Röda Sten, Gothenburgh, Sweden (September 16 - October 15, 2006)

Free Press is a project of the artist Sal Randolph in which writers are invited to contribute texts for publication. Manifestoes, artists statements and conceptual / experimental texts are especially welcomed, as well as writing about gifts and gifts economies, open systems, freedom of expression, censorship, surveillance, intellectual property, the commons and public domain, anarchy, cooperation, political philosophy, alternative economies, public space, urbanism, situationism and psychogeography, conceptual, performance, and participatory art, graffiti and street art, distributed creativity, social software, virtual worlds, open source, happenings, the 1960s, the future, utopian and postutopian visions. All material included in the Free Press project is released under Creative Commons license which will allow the texts to be printed and freely shared. These books are exhibited in Röda Sten.

My contribution to this project www.freewords.org is Un Identity and Other Essays which collates three articles: Un Identity, A New Script for Guy Debord's 'Critique of Separation', 1961, and Seven Works. This text can be downloaded or ordered from the freewords site.

Im-pression 2006, Grafisch Centrum HogeDRUKgebied

Im-pression 2006, Grafisch Centrum HogeDRUKgebied, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (September 16 - October 7, 2006)

Im-pression 2006, mail art & digital art is an "international artistic manifestation" organized from Rotterdam by the Centre for Graphic Arts "hogeDRUKgebied". Artists from all over the world using mail art or digital art have been invited to participate. 85 artists from 24 countries have responded by sending striking protests and minimalist suggestions using sober black & white and hundreds of colours, photographs, digital collages or reproductions of their painting, etching or poetry.
www.im-pression2006.skynetblogs.be
For this exhibition, I digitally-altered the cover of The Economist (August 19 - 25, 2006) magazine to 'erase' the original poster image.

Conflux 2006

Conflux 2006, various locations, Brooklyn, New York, USA (September 14 - September 17, 2006)

Conflux is the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography where international artists, technologists, urban adventurers and the public put investigations of everyday city life into practice on the streets. www.confluxfestival.org

For Conflux 2006, I contributed an essay which uses the script from the Rebel Press edition of "Society of the Spectacle and Other Films" by Guy Debord. The notes on the visual content, sub-titles and musical accompaniment remain the same, with a new commentary replacing the original written voiceover. This essay can also be found in full at www.cgclarke75essays.blogspot.com as A New Script for Guy Debord's Critique of Separation, 1961.

Terror?, Intersection for the Arts

Terror? at Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, USA (September 11 - November 11, 2006)

Terror? includes hundreds of original works from all over the world - creating a cacophony of personal and collective response to some of the most immediate questions and issues of our times. What is terror? Who perpetrates it? How does fear control us, and the world around us? Who are we taught to be afraid of, why? What does fear cost? Where does personal fear intersect with larger societal and political messages of terror? In addition to an exhibition in our gallery, Terror? includes a film screening, readings, public discussions and performance.

For my contribution to Terror? I exhibited Suspicious Package no. 3, a sealed envelope posted to the gallery without a return address. I e-mailed Intersection for the Arts ahead of the exhibition to warn them to expect an unknown package and that this wasn't to be opened, but rather shown as a piece in its own right. This work was informed by the outbreak of packages containing anthrax which were posted shortly after September 11th, 2001, and the hysteria which was caused by this. This seems like the natural consequence of the terrorist act; the cloud of suspicion which such a gesture subsequently casts on the everyday and the mundane.

Surface Gallery Open Show 2006

Surface Gallery Open Show 2006, Nottingham, UK
(July 27 to August 26, 2006)


artists: Alison Balance, Helen Barff, Emma Bolland, Tomas Chaffe, Chris Clarke, Sofia Dahlgren, Nigel Grimmer, Candice Jacobs, Natinder Manak, Claire McArdle, Jane Mellor, Ben Rivers, Mika Sembogi, Kaori Shiota, Matthew Smith, Alexander Stevenson

For this exhibition, I'll be showing De-Composition (Luigi Russolo), 2006, a tape recording removed from its cassette and stuffed inside a plastic case. This tape carries a recorded reading of Luigi Russolo's essay 'The Art of Noises', in which the author and futurist proposes the expansion of the musical field to incorporate incidental noise, background static, the din of factories and machines, and "all those [noises] that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing." This reading was recorded on June 2nd, 2006.