Artof

Ideas

The Witching HourDarkness and the Uncanny

Curated by Matthew Collings and Matt Price

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The Witching HourDarkness and the Uncanny

Curated by Matthew Collings and Matt Price

Hurvin Anderson - Richard Billingham - Graham Chorlton Faye Claridge - Ravi Deepres - Tessa Farmer - Brian Griffin

Roger Hiorns - Harminder Singh Judge - Chris Keenan - Idris Khan Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry - David Miller - Sally PayenJuneau Projects - Ged Quinn - David Rowan - Elizabeth Rowe George Shaw - Toby de Silva - Gillian Wearing - Stuart Whipps

Birmingham Museum and Art GalleryWaterhall Gallery

Chamberlain SquareBirmingham

B3 3DH

11 – 14 November2010

www.visualforbusiness.com

Art of Ideas presents:

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Foreword

Art of Ideas is proud to present The Witching Hour, an exhibition that revolves around the themes of darkness and the uncanny in the work of more than 20 artists based in, or from, Birmingham and the West Midlands. The exhibition features some of Britain’s most celebrated artists as well as many of the most exciting emerging artists in the region today, and has been curated by artist, writer and broadcaster Matthew Collings and writer, curator and editor Matt Price.

Now in its third edition, Art of Ideas is an initiative from Arts Council England West Midlands that aims to promote art market growth in Birmingham and the region. The initiative is led by Arts & Business, an agency that sparks new partnerships between commerce and culture, connecting individuals and companies to cultural organisations and providing the expertise and insight for them to prosper.

Many of the works featured in The Witching Hour are available for sale, and visitors to the exhibition are warmly invited to purchase works, whether for their homes or offices, for family or friends. One of the main goals of this edition of Art of Ideas is to promote the idea of collecting contemporary art in the region, whether in the private, public or commercial sectors.

The idea for this edition of Art of Ideas came out of research into regional

arts markets by Arts Council England. The West Midlands region is identified as a place where there is scope for considerable growth in the art markets, something that is vital to the arts economy, the success of the region’s art community and to the region’s wider cultural life.

In addition to The Witching Hour and this catalogue, Art of Ideas is pleased to present a special publication devoted to the topics of collecting, collections and collectors, accompanied by a programme of talks, events and workshops organised in association with Grand Union, Ikon Gallery, MAC, New Art Gallery Walsall and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Art of Ideas is supported by Birmingham City University and Business Link West Midlands.

We are grateful to Matthew Collings for hosting Art of Ideas and for his inspirational input to the exhibition, and to the participating artists and to their representatives, who have been a pleasure to work with. Thanks go to Freya Smaill for her illuminating essay, to Kerry Thomas for her help producing this publication, to Liz Hawley, Nicola Shipley, Matt Price, Dom Murphy, Nadia Dooner, Peter Collins and Katja Ogrin, and to the team at BMAG. We hope you enjoy the exhibition, publications and events as much as we have enjoyed preparing them.

Gavin BuckleyDirector of English Regions, Arts & Business

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Just Below the Surface: The Uncanny in The Witching Hour

by Freya Smaill

The mention of “the witching hour” excites our fascination in domesticated horror; stories of ghouls and goblins, haunted houses, and strange goings-on have infiltrated our society for as long as we can remember. This fascination has passed through generations – from the vocal storyteller, to the novels of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A Hoffman, through to contemporary horror films. It begs the question, what is the reason for our continued preoccupation with that quiet sense of dread, perhaps best described as “the uncanny”?

The Witching Hour, curated by Matthew Collings and Matt Price, investigates this question through the art of over 20 artists from or working in the West Midlands region. Indeed, it seems that from the beginning both the sensation and the concept of the uncanny has been best characterised through the creative impulses of those working within the arts – whether author, philosopher, filmmaker or fine artist, the uncanny has become an aesthetic category in itself. The work within this exhibition certainly foregrounds this feeling of the uncanny; the spectral shadows of human faces; spindly and cadaverous insects; decapitated actors and images of opulent skeletal figures. The less theatrical uncanny also has its place

within this exhibition and despite its more understated visual deliverance can be as destabilising for the viewer; the banal images familiar to our everyday existence, such as alley ways, a vase of flowers, and the interior of a factory, can hold a lurking sense of unease.

Perhaps the very reason that we are so enthralled by the uncanny, either by macabre curiosity or an undesired enchantment, is because its inception comes from within our subconscious, and by implication is something that we can never really shake off. This suggests that the continued expression of and investigation into the uncanny throughout the centuries has been a self-reflexive one.

In the early 20th century Freud described the uncanny, or in German unheimlich, as rooted in the environment of the domestic, or heimlich. He defined the uncanny as “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression... The uncanny [is] something which ought to have remained hidden but which has come to light”.1 The uncanny, therefore, is in a sense a haunting – a citation of something which has been once established and subsequently gone through a process of estrangement, finally returning as something unrecognised and shocking. The cultural and psychological ties between the experience of a haunting

David MillerDoom (IV)2007Photographic torch drawing

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and the feeling of the uncanny come then as no great surprise. Both are a question of return, and therefore of repetition; moreover, they both suggest a first burial, a supposed death of something which becomes more powerful and fearful by returning to a civilisation which believes it has no place for such a return. As Anthony Vidler articulates in The Architectural Uncanny, “at any moment, what seemed on the surface homely and comforting, secure and clear of superstition, might be reappropriated by something that should have remained secret but that nevertheless, through some chink in the shutters of progress had returned”.2 Freud believed that there was a single route from the safe, comforting house to the haunted one, suggesting that what we believe to be homely and innocuous also harbours that which is dangerous and obscure.

The feeling of the uncanny is evoked in Chris Keenan’s photograph, Prefab Tom, 2009. Showing a man standing at his rather

ordinary looking front door, one might think it a somewhat innocent visual statement. Looking closer, however, we see that the house is in fact a prefab shelter, an odd disjuncture to our normal assumptions of home and hearth. This disjuncture produces a feeling of the uncanny and we are visually barred from an explanation; the invitation to go in is obstructed by the gate, and the man’s presence at the door psychosomatically barricades our way in. What strange or dark secrets might be the cause for choosing to live within this iron garrison? Yet perhaps this feeling of unease comes from the uncertainty we have about the real object of disquiet. Is the object of fear perhaps us, the viewer? We are voyeurs of and strangers to this man, and his inquisitive pose suggests that we have made an unexpected intrusion. This photograph not only describes the uncanny passage between safe and familiar home to that which is unknown and unsafe, but also the uncanny of the transformation between feeling assured

Chris KeenanPrefab Tom

2009Photographic print

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in our empowered position as a viewer, to that position of authority being undermined by our confrontation with this man.

This transformation from safe to dangerous is not a physical one, but rather a transformation that takes place in the mind of the perceiver. As the uncanny is devised within the subconscious depths of our mind it naturally denotes that it exists as something immaterial and somewhat obscure, thus defining the irrational natures of our phobias. And so, if the passage between homely and un-homely is one which is manoeuvred within our minds, this passage then extends to the ambiguity between the real world and the dream world, our world and the spirit world. This accommodates Freud’s notion that repetition or return in the uncanny suggests a relationship to death via the representation of death in the doppelganger or double. The double, or the return of something under the same guise, is like that of the return of a discarded or repressed form, parallel to our relationship to death. The nature of Art, traditionally the mistress of deception, clearly has relevance here. In her study of Freud’s uncanny, Sarah Kofman argues that “erected to conquer death, art as a ‘double’, like any double, itself turns into an image of death. The game of art is a game of death, which already implies death in life”.3 The presence of the doppelganger, of death and of spectres, and moreover art as a powerful medium to present these subjects, has a strong thread throughout this exhibition.

Gillian Wearing’s photograph of the famous British model Lily Cole foregrounds the double in a most interesting way. Lily Cole confronts the viewer, eyes wide, pristinely presented in her virginal lace white dress. Yet she wears a mask which mimicries her natural face, making her seem somewhere

between human and porcelain doll; the mask, which is both concealment and presentation has a sinister relationship to the insatiable and consuming eye, which inadvertently begs to be deceived. The image of Lily Cole is altogether familiar to most people, yet the mask, whilst not actually dramatically changing her face, engenders an uncanny alteration of our perception of the woman behind. Feeling as though we are looking at Lily Cole’s double, there is something deathly and macabre about this image. Indeed, the celebrity is immortalised by visual culture; the plethora of images in circulation turns them into not only a simulacra, an object without any original, but the duplication of the celebrity in the image also turns them into an image of death. As Freud suggested, narcissism and the reach for immortality is punishable by death. The doppelganger is also experienced in the

Gillian WearingLily Cole

2009C-Type print

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work of David Miller’s photographic torch drawings, yet here the faceless shadows turn back on the viewer; with no clear face to substitute the shadow with, we project an image of ourselves and by egotistical implication the whole of humanity onto the image. Similar to the picture of Lily Cole, we are staring into the face of our own death as our doppelganger is self-produced in the image. Karen Kihlberg and Reuben Henry’s portraits of decapitated actors and film stars, eyes staring in a horrified and deathly gaze also explore the notion of celebrity mortality. Film stars’ saturation in our culture engenders them as almost familial subjects, and these images are uncanny as we see them in the moment of their demise. Yet looking closer, these are stills from famous scenes in their movies,

and we are thus deceived twice; by the nature of representation of art producing the film stars’ doppelganger, and also by our absorption into the narrative of film. For a moment we forget the distinction between real life and fantasy, as in Tessa Farmer’s tiny sets of foliage containing models of insects and warrior skeletons. Whilst present in their three-dimensionality, they are also arrested by impossibility. Similarly, Toby de Silva’s series of skeletons posthumously enlivened by their apparently smiling skulls, opulently dressed and sitting in almost relaxed poses (and indeed quite real in that they are relics from a German

Karin Kihlberg and Reuben HenryDead Actor no.112010 Pencil on paper

Opposite page:Tessa Farmer and Sean Daniels

Nest of the Skeletons2008

Stop motion animation

Following pages:Elizabeth Rowe

Will go underground2010

Ink on newspaper

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church crypt) are impossible in their state of death. Away from death, and toward temporal unreality are Hurvin Anderson’s woodblock print of a barbershop and Juneau Projects’ graphically characterised wood carvings; seemingly technologized in their acerbic lines, the images are elevated out of this reality and into a future one. On the other hand, Elizabeth Rowe’s swimming figure under an explosive sky of coloured ink, rather than catapulting us into the future, demands that we extract time altogether and enter a dreamlike, fantastical environment. This slippage of fiction into reality is an infamous genre of the uncanny, going back to stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart.

Indeed, something of the alter-realistic uncanny is in Roger Hiorn’s flammable gutter drain; once familiar to us in our daily lives, the drain is ignited into the absurd. Hiorn’s startling images of outstretched arms with hands stressed in different positions also evoke the uncanny; while we still recognise them as arms and hands, the photographer dehumanises and thus abstracts the limbs by transforming them into components of visual composition.

The uncanny can also be interpreted in our postmodern relationship to our built environment. This relationship is rooted in the advent of the modern city and facilitated by the 19th-century industrial revolutions. As cities grew larger, the individual lost his or her place, communities were swallowed up and traditions put to death. Indeed, society became a monolithic workforce, compartmentalised rather than individualised. Here, the uncanny was enabled through a distancing from reality necessitated by an unliveable reality.4 Yet in the 19th century, the city was still essentially designed as a memory theatre for both inhabitants and visitors alike. Great monuments, famous streets, and celebrated buildings were erected to act

as sign posts for memories – whether real or imagined – and were meant, perhaps by force, to keep alive the civic character of those within the city.5 Nevertheless, with modern life dictated by the new industrial regime, people began to feel a great unsettledness, or homelessness. In 1944 Theodor Adorno famously stated, “Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible”. This feeling of homelessness, and by extension homesickness, developed further as architects such as Le Corbusier canonised an architecture which demanded transparency. The home was quite literally bulldozed in favour of “utopian” apartment blocks, fashioned like glasshouses to let light flood where darkness had once existed. This new impersonalised city secured our lack of collective memory, and we are famously now living in a post historical moment. We are ultimately nostalgic for an idealised past that we imagine once was – a nostalgia for home and community.

Harminder Singh Judge’s ritualistic images and Faye Claridge’s photographs of traditional Morris dancers both foreground the idea of ceremony, which is in essence defined by community. Ravi Deepres’ images similarly foreground this idea of community in his photographs of architecture hung in patriots’ flags. Once familiar to us, the idea of ceremony has now become estranged and odd, and in our postmodern city our ties to community have become unfastened; these images therefore facilitate a deep sense of uncanny as whilst looking at them our loss of community tremors within our minds. Richard Billingham’s photograph of a moonlit graveyard is disquieting not only for its visual suggestion of community

Ged QuinnI Am an Ear of Corn in Sun and Wind (detail)

2010Oil on canvas

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in death, but also because death is our ultimate return to rest, parallel to us being within the womb. The graveyard in this sense is our final return home, and in a world of homelessness and homesickness the activation of this subconscious desire is at once uncanny and unnerving.

In Ged Quinn’s bizarre pastoral landscape our nostalgia for an idealised and idolised past is confronted. While this past is envisioned through traditional landscape, the strange characters produce disjuncture and shock in the image, recalling to the viewer that this romanticised bucolic past does not necessarily exist, and if it ever did it is surely alienated from us now. On the other hand, Brian Griffin’s photographs of empty landscapes are almost unbearably uncanny in their absence of people. The insurmountable volume of people in our daily lives, albeit the majority of which are strangers, has the effect of making spatial emptiness a foreign environment to us and one of which to be suspicious.

Other artists explore the eeriness produced by the absence of human bodies as in David Rowan’s photographic series of a decommissioned newspaper printing factory arrested from work. Graham Chorlton’s paintings are images of urban architecture and the appearance of light, whether from a window or a street lamp, suggests the presence of life. Yet this life is nowhere to be seen as in the same image, Chorlton paints archetypal and impersonalised architecture, and explores our need to endlessly produce, rather than produce anything of necessity for other human beings. Stuart Whipps’s photograph, Basildon Newtown, 2010, dismembers

and decontextualizes architecture, having the effect of removing it from a lived environment, similar to the effect in George Shaw’s melancholic painting of a seemingly uninhabited council estate. This typically British council estate is part of our national and cultural inheritance, meaning that we have a familial relationship with this architecture – yet in its apparent abandonment it seems estranged from us. This estrangement is mirrored in Shaw’s process of painting; the artist’s touch is a prerequisite for the act of painting and he therefore undertakes an essential and personal relationship to the final image. Yet Shaw’s almost photographic execution of the work at the same time seems to erase the artist’s trace from the painting.

Idris Khan seems to abstract architecture from reality altogether in his spectral transcriptions of the photography of the

Graham ChorltonLights (detail)2002 Acrylic on canvas

Idris Khanevery... Bernd & Hilla Becher Spherical

Type Gasholder, 2003Lambda digital C-type print mounted on aluminium

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Freya Smaill is a freelance writer who lives and works in London. She has a degree in History of Art from University of Warwick and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. She is also Gallery Manager of Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, Mayfair, London.

German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Becher’s systematic project of photographing industrial structures, such as gas and water towers, began in the late nineteen-fifties and they were particularly interested in the element of design. Yet these structures were already becoming obsolete, and Khan’s reworking of the Bechers’ images reiterates the efficacy of time to supersede these working edifices. Created by our hunger for progress, we have left a graveyard of industrial skeletons which nevertheless continue to haunt our landscapes and society. In a similar way, the Becher images continue to haunt in their beauty and power, which is emphasised by Khan’s spectral manipulations.

Finally, Sally Payen’s barely perceptible paintings visually assert that even the recent past is scarcely traceable in our collective memory. These are images of riots in Birmingham, Brighton and Northern Ireland, which have all taken place in recent history. Payen has painted these works largely from her memory of images in her research using newspaper cuttings, CCTV images, and visual records

Endnotes:1. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), Art and Literature, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, edited by Albert Dickinson (Harmondsworth: The Penguin Books, 1985), p. 64

2. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely (MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London England, 1996) P. 27

3. Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, translated by Winifred Woodhull (New York, 1988), p. 128

4. Vidler (1996) p. 6

5. Ibid, pp. 177-180

Sally PayenThe lost scene of a lost dual; dual scene with fallen hounds. Part 1 (detail)2010Oil on canvas

from television and the Internet. In her phantasmal breakdown of architectural space and historical protagonists, she artistically asserts the ease of forgetting in a world where time only points forward, rarely allowing us to ruminate past events of cultural and historical importance.

In its blend of emerging and established artists working in different mediums, The Witching Hour creates a dialogue between diverse work which administers to the viewer a complex and sometimes unsettling visual and psychological experience. From the doppelganger to the spectre, from death to unreality, and from the architecturally caused nostalgia, loss of community and homesickness, we are taken on a journey which reaches across the breadth of the aesthetic category of the uncanny. This exhibition reminds us that the ghouls and goblins which engrossed our imaginations as children, and which still make us shudder as adults, can be embodied in unanticipated forms. Moreover, they exist just below the surface of our minds and our society, capable of making their disquieting return at the most unexpected of moments.

Works in Show

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Hurvin Anderson

Untitled2009

Woodblock and woodcut printImage Size: 65.2 x 55.9 cmPaper Size: 90.8 x 71.1 cm

Paper: Bianc Nature White 300gEdition: 40

Printed by Durham Press, PennsylvaniaCourtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Price: £2500 + VAT (framed)

Born in Birmingham in 1965 to a family that came to the UK from Jamaica, London-based artist Hurvin Anderson has recently established himself as one of the most celebrated painters in the UK. Represented by Thomas Dane Gallery, London, with whom he has had two solo exhibitions to date, Anderson has had a major exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and exhibited at institutions including Tate Britain, The Hermitage and the Saatchi Gallery. In the Midlands he has exhibited at Leicester Museum and at the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick in Coventry.

In The Witching Hour, Anderson is showing an untitled woodblock and woodcut print that he produced with Durham Press in Pennsylvania earlier this year. The print is related to a body of work by the artist entitled Peter’s Series, which revolves around the theme of an attic converted into a makeshift barbershop where his father used to get a trim and socialise with other members of the Caribbean community in Birmingham soon after arriving in the 1950s. Writing about the series for Frieze online, Colin Perry asserts: “The sketchiness of these renderings exudes existential uncertainty: walls, chairs and mirrors seem to melt continuously into the abstraction of anemic winter light. It’s a vision of an awkwardly accommodated immigrant culture.”

The woodblock print is both beautiful and mildly intimidating, attractive and yet alienating. The absence of humans from the scene, with off-cuts of their hair on the floor, makes an otherwise familiar and everyday scene slightly unnerving, charged with an understated yet piercing sense of suspense. The stylized rectilinear lines of the image, rendered in a discrete yet striking palette of blacks, charcoals, greys and blues, are matched by an equally engaging variety of patterns and textures, resulting in an accomplished, stylish and memorable image.

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Richard Billingham

Untitled, from the series Black Country2003

Colour lightjet prints110.5 x 136 cm (each, framed)

Edition: 5 + 1 APCourtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

Price on request

Born in Birmingham in 1970, Richard Billingham studied at Bournville College of Art before continuing his education at the University of Sunderland. He was catapulted to international attention through a body of photographic work about his family in Cradley Heath in the Black Country, West Midlands. The series was published in the much acclaimed publication Ray’s a Laugh in 1996. Billingham was included in the seminal exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997 – a show that defined the internationally renowned Young British Artists (YBAs) – and that same year he won the Citigroup Photography Prize.

In 2001 Billingham had a significant solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, for which he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. In 2006 he exhibited a body of photographic and film work entitled Zoo, inspired by a trip to Dudley Zoo when he was a child. The exhibition was developed with Birmingham-based media arts agency VIVID and was presented at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, West Midlands. Billingham is represented by major London gallerist Anthony Reynolds, with whom he had a solo exhibition in spring this year. He has exhibited in many group shows around the world, including I Am A Camera (Saatchi Gallery), Give and Take (Serpentine Gallery), 49th Venice Biennale, New Photography 12 (MOMA) and Picture of Britain (Tate Britain). His work is in many public and private collections worldwide, including Tate, The V&A, The Government Art Collection, The Arts Council Collection, The National Gallery of Scotland, and MOMA New York.

For The Witching Hour, Billingham presents three nighttime works from the larger series Black Country, originally developed with The Public in West Bromwich in 2003 and which have since been shown in Spain and Italy, among other countries. Taken around the area in which he grew up, the series presents an honest and unaffected view of the Black Country, seemingly objective, neutral and detached yet infused with the intimacy, affection and curiosity that characterizes his practice. The three works on show here represent suburban contexts at night, ranging from the poetic and romantic to the hostile and foreboding, from the mundane to the gothic.

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Graham Chorlton

Blinds no. 32009

Acrylic on canvas 51 x 41 cm

Courtesy the artistPrice: £2100

Lights2002

Acrylic on canvas 51 x 41 cm

Courtesy the artistPrice: £2100

Graham Chorlton is one of the most popular and respected painters based in the West Midlands today. His depictions of the interiors and exteriors of buildings, architecture, civil engineering, cityscapes and landscapes are both anonymous and familiar – places we think we might know, or may once have been. Many of his recent works have been of locations in Birmingham, although many could almost be of anywhere – a factory in rural Poland, a bridge in the suburbs of Chicago, a car park on the outskirts of Paris perhaps. While some are of places the artist has passed almost every day for years, they are generic, quotidien, archetypal structures from different eras of the modern world, physical manifestations of our daily need to work, to get around, to be somewhere for a while.

For The Witching Hour, Chorlton presents two works, one a recent image of a multi-storey residential building by night, its brown facade tinged with an acidic green by streetlights below. Two blinds stand out, brightly illuminated against the backdrop of the otherwise monotonous windows, receding into the distance. The other work, Lights, is an older painting depicting vintage street lamps against a similarly imposing building by night, this time suffused in an atmospheric red light. Both paintings capture a sense of the beauty and excitement of looking at buildings by night – a time of night when most people are already asleep. It is a time when anything could happen...

Chorlton has recently had solo exhibitions with Cross Gallery, Dublin, and Master Piper, London. In addition to having exhibited in East International, Norwich, John Moores, Liverpool, and at Ikon, Birmingham, Chorlton has had solo shows at venues such as the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, University College, Worcester, and the Library Gallery, University of Warwick. He was recently awarded first prize for painting in both the Leamington Gallery Open and The Birmingham Open at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. He was also awarded the De Vere’s Prize at the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition, Dublin, in 2007.

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Faye Claridge

From the series Only a Stranger Can Bring Good Luck, Only a Known Man Can Hang

200859 x 49 cm (each, framed)

Lambda print on Ilford archive paperEdition of 25, signed by the artist

Courtesy the artist£340 framed / £270 unframed

Having graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a first class degree, Faye Claridge went on to gain an MA with distinction from the Institute of Art and Design at Birmingham City University in 2005. She has had more than ten solo exhibitions, including The Legend of the Artist at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, and Descendants of the Unfamiliar at Danielle Arnaud, London. In addition to this she has participated in many group exhibitions, including at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Tatton Park Biennial, Cheshire, and the 8th International Hellenic Festival, Athens. Currently artist-in-residence at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, in spring 2011 she will be exhibiting at Compton Verney.

For The Witching Hour, Claridge presents two images from the series Only A Stranger Can Bring Good Luck, Only A Known Man Can Hang, depicting a troupe of Morris dancers from Bedfordshire wearing their traditional costumes and carrying the paraphernalia associated with their dances. Some of the members of the group have their faces blackened, which, according to a review of Claridge’s exhibition at Danielle Arnaud in Time Out magazine, was originally “to maintain anonymity and avoid persecution”. Set against painted backdrops and surrounded by bushes, plants and flowers, the sitters appear as if characters from a play, illuminated in the centre of the photograph with darkness encroaching around the edges.

These striking images are both jovial and disconcerting, jolly and sinister, colourful and dark, bringing out the more threatening, almost supernatural side of British folk traditions and the elements of paganism that are sometimes associated with them. The series of work was originally created during a residency at BCA Gallery in Bedford.

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Ravi Deepres

Patriots series – Lisbon2006

Photographic print40 x 65 cm

Edition of 19£450 (unframed)

All images courtesy the artist

Birmingham and London-based artist Ravi Deepres is known internationally for his film, photographic and digital media work. His work has been seen in shows across the UK including Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Cornerhouse, Manchester, The Lowry, Salford, and Rencontres d’Arles. Film commissions and installations include those for Channel 4, BBC1, Capture4 Season, the Institute of Contemporary Art and The Great North Run moving image commission award for Runner, which focuses on psychological and physical endurance. Large-scale choreographic film/photographic pieces have been commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, The Royal Opera House, Paris Opera House and La Scala.

For over a decade Deepres has been producing work about identity, especially in relation to sport – how individuals and crowds are influenced psychologically by factors around them including the the media, architecture, patriotism and social conditioning. A recent solo exhibition at The Public in West Bromwich, entitled Union, examined these themes through photographs of football fans. The exhibition follows on from Patriots, an on-going exploration of national identity manifested through football, which has seen the artist working in the UK, France, Portugal and Japan among other countries.

One of the recurring motifs in his work is the St. George’s cross, particularly in the form of flags as they appear at football matches, in the streets, on cars and on buildings, growing into an engaging study of patriotism in the urban and suburban environment. In one of the works featured in The Witching Hour, a house in Billesley in Birmingham is captured with flags adorning its facade and front garden. This display of national pride is not, apparently, restricted to major sporting events, but is present all year round, making the house an uncanny shrine to the English flag. Another piece from the Patriots series on show in The Witching Hour depicts the Portuguese flag on a building in Lisbon at night, illuminated by a street lamp. The flag becomes a strange nighttime signifier of the identities of the people asleep inside.

The third work by Deepres for The Witching Hour is from a body of work entitled The Museum of Lost Heritage series, which shows a view out of the former science museum in Birmingham city centre. An arched window, covered in dust and cobwebs, appears pitch black against the daylight outside, revealing the buildings and rooftops of an area of the city centre that is still undergoing extensive regeneration. The image seems like a a hangover from the past – a vestige of Birmingham’s Victorian heritage now fallen into shadow as the world moves on outside.

Museum Of Lost Heritage series2007

Photographic print70 x 40 cm

Edition of 19£500 (unframed)

Patriots series – Billesley2006

Photographic print40 x 65 cm

Edition of 19£450 (unframed)

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Tessa Farmer

Tessa FarmerThe Nuptial Flight

2010Bones, insects, plant roots

35 wide x 35 deep x 45 cm tall Courtesy the artist and Danielle Arnaud, London

Price: £4000 + VAT(Image for illustration purposes only)

Artist Tessa Farmer, born in 1978, is one of Birmingham’s best kept secrets, having been quietly establishing herself as one of the city’s leading emerging talents. Having grown up on the border between Moseley and Kings Heath, she did a foundation in art at Bournville before gaining a place at the prestigious Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where she completed both her BA and MA. Subsequent awards include the Vivien Leigh Prize, a sculpture residency in King’s Wood, Challock, Kent, and a Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award. In 2007 she was nominated for The Times/The South Bank Show Breakthrough Award. She has shown work in many exhibitions including Thinking the Unthinkable at The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, Miniature Worlds at the Jerwood Space, London, and The Terror at Firstsite in Colchester. In 2007 she undertook a residency at the Natural History Museum in London. Her work is in collections worldwide, including those of the Saatchi Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum and the David Roberts Collection. She is represented by Danielle Arnaud, London, with whom she will be having a solo exhibition in May 2011. A series of installations by Farmer was recently presented in Paris by Arnaud at the Show Off Paris art fair.

For The Witching Hour, Farmer is showing The Nuptial Flight, a new work created especially for the exhibition. The work is a sculptural installation made from her trademark materials of dead insects, bones, plant roots and other natural substances. These intricately made scenarios involve malevolent fairies battling creatures from the natural world and suggest the kind of evil forces that might come out during the witching hour. In association with Sean Daniels, Farmer also presents one of her extraordinary digital stop motion animations, Nest of the Skeletons, which documents the breeding of the foul fairies who then lay siege to bumble bees on a battleground inside a scarecrow. The animation is as creepy as it is beautiful, bringing fiction to life in the world of natural history.

Tessa Farmer and Sean DanielsNest of the Skeletons

2008Stop motion animation

5 min. 40 sec.Edition of 5 plus 2 A/P1 and 2: £2500 + VAT 3 and 4: £3500 + VAT

5: £5000 + VATCourtesy the artists and Danielle Arnaud, London

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Brian Griffin

From the series The Water People2006

Digital lightjet print105 x 105 cm (framed)

Edition of 10 (each print)Courtesy the artist

Price on request

Brian Griffin was born in Birmingham in 1948 and studied photography in Manchester before starting work as a freelance photographer in 1972. Since then he has produced images for major magazines and advertising campaigns in Britain and abroad, as well as self-publishing several books of his work. He has a long association with the music industry, numbering among his subjects Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, Ringo Starr, Peter Gabriel, Depeche Mode and REM. Griffin’s work is held by British and international collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Birmingham Central Library. Griffin is also the first commissioned photographer for the National Portrait Gallery BT Road to 2012 Project, part of the Cultural Olympiad, exhibited at the National Gallery in 2010. Face to Face, a retrospective of Griffin’s work, organised by Pete James and Nicola Shipley, is on display at a number of venues in central Birmingham until 21 November.

Griffin’s works for The Witching Hour are drawn from the series entitled The Water People. The work was made as part of a commission from the geo-thermal energy company, Reykjavik Energy, which distributes electricity, geothermal water for heating, and cold water for consumption to half of Iceland’s population. Taking his inspiration from Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Griffin embarked on an extraordinary journey across the bleak yet hauntingly beautiful Icelandic landscape, following the operations of the company, on a mythical journey to discover The Water People. The resulting works – a series of portraits blurred through water to the point of seeming deformed or grotesque and landscapes which look unreal, as if scenes from a science fiction film – are imbued with Griffin’s characteristic element of surprise. The works offer an unusual and memorable portrayal of one of the most fundamental industries that caters for our existence.

34

Roger Hiorns

Fleet Street2005

Four b/w photographic prints (framed)41 x 44 cm each

UniqueCourtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Price on request

Born in Birmingham in 1975, London-based Roger Hiorns studied fine art at Bournville College before undertaking a BA in fine art at Goldsmiths, London. He has since established himself as one of the most exciting artists of his generation, often using unusual materials and processes in his work to great effect. One of his most acclaimed works, Seizure, produced in association with Artangel in 2008, involved transforming an ex-council flat into a grotto of blue copper sulphate crystals. In other works he has created sculptures that pump foam into the gallery space, used brain matter alongside car engines, and even the powdered remains of a jet engine. Represented in London by Corvi-Mora and in Los Angeles by Marc Foxx, Hiorns has recently presented a commissioned site specific project at the Art Institute of Chicago and has also had solo shows at institutions including UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Tate Britain, Milton Keynes Gallery and Camden Arts Centre along with many group exhibitions around the world. He is currently featuring in the British Art Show 7, at Nottingham Contemporary. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

For The Witching Hour, Hiorns presents a series of four photographic prints from 2005 entitled Fleet Street. The works are mysterious, the imagery contained suggestive of some strange ritual, perhaps connected to witchcraft or the occult. The gestures of the hands might be from a ceremony or spell, the flowers an ingredient with some sinister powers. The flames emerging from a drain in a street imply something is wrong or unnatural, leading to thoughts of the underworld, hell and its endless fires. The grey hue of the series adds to the sense of mystery and the macabre, injecting what might be perfectly harmless imagery with an air of malfaisance.

36

Harminder Singh Judge

Self Portrait (after Kali and Gene)2009

Photographic print80 x 53 cm (unframed)

Edition of 7 (+1AP + 1 exhibition copy)Courtesy the artist

£700 (framed) / £650 (unframed)

Born in the North of England in 1982 and now based in Birmingham, Harminder Singh Judge’s practice encompasses performance and live art, sculptural installation, music and digital media to explore notions of personal identity, religious traditions and modern subculture. While his own spiritual beliefs remain unclear, his work reflects the polyphony of belief systems that characterize British society today and opens up possibilities for the meeting of ideas from different perspectives, often with unexpected juxtapositions. Mixing together ancient religious themes with recent pop and rock culture from Britain and the States, Judge’s practice is both sincere and humorous, exploring idolatry, fame, spirituality and faith in the age of late capitalism.

In 2010 Judge had a significant solo exhibition at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, entitled The Inconsistency of Everything, a version of which travelled to 198 Contemporary Art in London. A major performance work accompanied the exhibition, entitled The Modes of Al-Ikseer, and was premiered at the Arnolfini in Bristol. He has exhibited at Ikon, Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery, The National Review of Live Art at Tramway, Glasgow, and Tate Modern among others, and following a 6-week research residency in Kuala Lumpur, will be participating in the Spill Festival of Performance at the Barbican, London, in April 2011. He has been nominated for an Arts Foundation Fellowship Award in Live Performance Art.

For The Witching Hour, Judge is premiering a new work, Arcade Laser Iconoclasm, which takes the form of three photographic prints of an image of the band Arcade Fire, appropriated from the music industry media, onto which he has projected bright drawings created by lasers which he has then rephotographed. This process turns iconic imagery into personalised homage, echoing the stage effects of live music performance. Also on show is Self Portrait (after Kali and Gene) – a photograph of the artist himself, his face blacked out with just the whites of his eyes, his teeth and tongue standing out. The image is inspired in equal measure by the devilish Hindu goddess Kali and Gene Simmons, lead singer of rock legends Kiss. It is a startling and arresting image that is better suited to nightmares than to Judge’s family photo album.

Arcade Laser Iconoclasm2010

Photographic prints on metallic coated paper31.5 x 20.5 cm (unframed)

Edition of 15 (+1AP + 1 exhibition copy)Courtesy the artist

£225 each (framed) / £150 each (unframed)Triptych: £600 (framed) / £375 (unframed)

38

Chris Keenan

Prefab Tom2009

Photographic print75 x 70 cm

UniqueCourtesy the artist

Price on request

Born in 1979, photographer and filmmaker Chris Keenan lives and works in Birmingham.He travels internationally on a diverse range of self-initiated and commissioned projects. One of the most significant projects to date has been based on a series of trips to New Orleans, originally documenting the city’s underground music scene in February 2005. The effects of Hurricane Katrina only a few months later led to Keenan returning in February 2006 and again in February 2007. The resulting body of work, 9th Ward Scars, shows the marks left by the army rescue workers on the sides of buildings, documenting their findings from inside to inform fellow support services working in the area. The numbers and letters sprayed onto the buildings offer a stark statement of the scale of the disaster, and of how quickly a home can become a derelict site, a problem to be dealt with. With commissions from Southern Comfort and photographic work published in Dazed and Confused, Vice, Blowback and Fused magazines, other projects have taken the artist to Prague and Greece.

The themes of houses, homes and domesticity connect closely to the piece Keenan is exhibiting in The Witching Hour – a photograph of a man called Tom in front of his prefab house in Moseley, Birmingham. Often buidlings that were only intended as temporary housing after the Second World War for those whose homes had been destroyed by bombs, the house is one of a row of prefab houses that have not only outlived their expected lifespans, but have now become architectural curiosities, anachronisms to be preserved as examples of their type. Keenan’s image is an endearing one, the proud owner of the home standing at his front door. There is something fairytale-like in the image yet also something modern and everyday, mixing together to create an appealing though unsettling image, as if something sinister might underlie the otherwise idyllic scene. In 2009, the work was shown in a major group show at the Centre for Fine Art Photography, Colorado, and was selected by internationally renowned photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

40

Idris Khan

Annie2009

Digital C-type mounted on aluminium20.3 x 25.4 cm

Edition of 10 plus 1 artist’s proof (#5/10)Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Price on request

every... Bernd & Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, every... Bernd & Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder,

every... Bernd & Hilla Becher Gable Sided House2003

Lambda digital C-type print mounted on aluminiumTriptych, each panel 203 x 165 cm

Exhibition copy Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Not for sale

Born in Walsall in 1978, Idris Khan has rapidly established himself as one of Britain’s most exciting young artists working on the international stage today. Having undertaken a foundation course at Walsall College of Art, he continued to a BA in photography at the University of Derby before proceeding to an MFA with distinction at the Royal College of Art in 2004. That same year he won the coveted Photographers’ Gallery Prize. Soon after graduating he was snapped up by Victoria Miro, one of the most prestigious galleries in the UK. He has since also exhibited with Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York and Thomas Schulte Gallery in Berlin, as well as solo shows at major public institutions including K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf. He has participated in many group exhibitions around the world, including at venues such as the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and Kunsthalle Helsinki. He has works in collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Khan is known for his innovative, complex and beautiful works, created through dense and subtle layering of photographic imagery, building into haunting and beguiling palimpsests. His subjects have ranged from all of the late works of Caravaggio to all the pages of the Holy Qur’an, from all the postcards of Turner’s paintings in Tate Britain to every photo of the Brown Sisters by Nicholas Nixon (currently on show at the Royal Academy in the exhibition No New Thing Under The Sun). For The Witching Hour, Khan presents his iconic triptych of works made in response to the industrial photography of Bernd & Hilla Becher, along with a recent work based on the life of his wife, Annie. Ghostly, fantasmic, dark and yet consistently beautiful, Khan’s work is a remarkable exploration of perception, psychology and cultural memory in the media age.

42

Karin Kihlberg &Reuben Henry

Dead Actor no.9, 10 and 112010

Pencil on paper 70 x 100 cm (each)

Courtesy the artists and Danielle Arnaud, London£3200 + VAT each (framed)

This Story is About a Little Boy 2009

DVD Video 4:3 9 min. 39 sec.

Edition of 5 + 1 APCourtesy the artists and Danielle Arnaud, London

£900 + VAT

Karin Kihlberg was born in Sweden in 1978 and Reuben Henry in England in 1979. They are based in London and Birmingham. On completing their studies in Birmingham, they established the Springhill Institute, a space for exhibitions, performances, screenings and all manner of events that became a significant part of the artist-led community in Birmingham and the West Midlands, and its links with the international art world. With their careers increasingly taking them abroad for residencies, exhibitions and projects, Springhill Institute has now become a mobile platform for activities.

The artists’ practice employs a variety of mediums, including film, photography, performance, drawing, text and digital media. Often related to cinematography and films, their works explore narratives and how they are created and presented to audiences. As such, the works are very much about the mechanics of culture, getting behind the scenes to investigate how we as viewers perceive, process and respond to fiction. For The Witching Hour the artists present three arresting drawings from a series of works depicting dead actors, or more accurately, actors who are playing characters who are dead. In addition to this is an engaging video work in which someone can be heard describing their memories of a film. The artists have attempted to reconstruct the storyteller’s memories by using corresponding extracts from the original film. Postmodern, fascinating, intelligent and often darkly humorous, Kilhberg and Henry’s works demand concentration and are well worth the effort.

Kihlberg and Henry have had solo exhibitions at VIVID, Birmingham, the New Art Gallery, Walsall, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, and Citric Gallery, Brescia. In 2011 they will have solo shows at Artsway in the New Forest and Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth. They are represented by Danielle Arnaud, London, with whom they exhibited at Volta art fair, Basel, earlier this year. They have participated in group exhibitions at Bluecoat, Liverpool, Grand Union, Birmingham, Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, and Tensta Konsthall, Sweden, as well as at fairs including Zoo, London, and Artissima, Turin.

44

David Miller

Doom (I-IV)2007

Photographic torch drawings145 x 127 cm (each)

Courtesy the artist£750 (each)

David Miller is an artist based in Birmingham, and co-curator of Trove in Birmingham city centre. He recently had a solo exhibition at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, entitled The Freedom Cabinet, part of a series of exhibitions called Treasure Seekers, curated by Charlie Levine and Kate Pennington-Wilson. He has also had solo shows at Crowd6 Gallery, Birmingham, The Central Lion Bridge in Taiwan and the Swan Theatre Art Gallery in High Wycombe. He has participated in group exhibitions at Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery (where he won a prize for photography), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Midlands Arts Centre, Ikon, and Kaohsiung Museum and Art Gallery, Taiwan, among others. He has received a number of funding awards from agencies including Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.

Miller’s practice often revolves around darkness and dandyism – one body of work exhibited at Leicester City Gallery saw the artist dressed in top hat and tails in faded (and still fading further) black-and-white photographic prints, as if from the family album of a 19th-century poet. Regularly exploring photographic-based techniques, he has been busy at work in the photographic dark room creating a series of drawings on photographic paper. The paper remains white until it is developed, meaning that the drawings are done without being able to see the results in progress. The results are curious desert-like landscapes with figures and trees in the foreground. The spectral element of these pieces is shared by his works for The Witching Hour. Entitled Doom (I-IV) the artist created a series of large photographic works using torchlight; shadowy figures, silhouetted against bleak grey backgrounds stare out at the viewer, their features obscurred by blurred darkness. Inspired by the story of the destruction of the world in the Book of Revelation, the figures reference the four horsemen of the apocalypse and perhaps the grim reaper himself. Like photos on passports to the afterlife, these works allude to terrorists, martyrs and the viewer’s subconscious fears of death and ‘the other’.

46

Sally Payen

The lost scene of a lost dual; dual scene with fallen hounds. Parts 1 and 2

2010Oil on canvas

121 x 150 cm (each)Courtesy the artist and Galleria Gallerati, Rome

Photo: Jaime JacksonPrice: £1750 (each)

With an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art and a practice-based PhD from the University of Brighton, Sally Payen is one of the most exciting and accomplished painters currently working in the West Midlands. Based in Herefordshire, she is represented by Galleria Gallerati in Rome, with whom she had a significant solo exhibition earlier this year. Her connections with Italy began in 2009 when she was invited to participate in a group exhibition at Forte Sangello Art Gallery and Museum Netunno in Rome. She has exhibited in Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Miami, Art Futures, London, and at Flowers East, London. In the West Midlands she has recently presented works in the exhibition Grief and Oblivion at Trove, and had a solo show in the exhibition spaces of architectural firm Bryant Priest Newman.

In her most recent body of work, Payen explores rioting and protesting in relation to the history of battle paintings. Informed by CCTV footage, clips and images from the Internet, newspaper cuttings and scenes captured from films and television, the artist makes a number of studies, often in ink on vellum, before proceeding to make a painting. At this point she paints mostly from memory rather than referring constantly to the source materials, perhaps going some way towards explaining the half-forgotten, dreamlike qualities of her work, poised between the figurative and the abstract. With references including protests in Birmingham and Brighton, as well as material relating to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the paintings depict police in riot gear in the midst of civilians, some of whom seem confrontational, others simply passersby caught up in the events. Two works from this new series are presented, for the first time, in The Witching Hour.

48

Juneau Projects

Sang de Boeuf 2010

Black MDF33 x 80 x 5 cm

Courtesy the artists / Ceri Hand Gallery£2500 + VAT

(Images for illustration purposes only)

Birmingham-based Juneau Projects (Philip Duckworth and Ben Sadler) have been working together since the turn of the millennium. Duckworth, born in Iserlohn, Germany, in 1976, graduated with a BA from Coventry; Sadler, born in Birmingham in 1977, undertook a BFA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, before going on to complete an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2004. They have had a significant number of solo exhibitions, including venues such as The Showroom, London, MIMA, Middlesbrough, New Art Gallery Walsall, Tate Britain, and Quad, Derby. A major solo touring show was shown at Ikon, Birmingham, Wysing Arts, Cambridgeshire, Model Arts, Sligo, FACT, Liverpool, and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. They have participated in many group shows, including the British Art Show 6, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the ICA, London, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and CAC Vilnius, Lithuania. They are represented by Ceri Hand Gallery.

Working in an eclectic range of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, music and new media, Juneau Projects explore the relationships between cultural traditions and their counterparts in contemporary society. Whether by painting images of the natural world onto tambourines or motorbike helmets, creating giant outdoor wooden sculptures covered with moss and lichen that rapidly turn to ruins, devising computer games and folktronica musical scores, or facilitating battles with cardboard suits of armour and weaponry, their practice connects folk and craft traditions with current technology and subcultures, from goth culture to Emo, death metal to folk.

For The Witching Hour, Juneau Projects present two sculptures made of black MDF (illustrated here with digital drawings made in preparation for the sculptures). Part of a series of new works (some of which were on show this autumn in the exhibition Black Hole Hums B Flat organised by Ceri Hand Gallery at a temporary space in London), By Hammer and Hand takes its title from the motto of The Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, which was formed in Birmingham in 1890 under the leadership of the silversmith and architect Arthur Stansfield Dixon. The Guild, under financial pressures, merged with the company E & R Gittins in 1905. Sang de Boeuf is the name of a glaze invented and used by the Birmingham-based Ruskin Pottery factory. The factory was founded in 1898 by William Howson Taylor, who disbanded the company in 1933, refusing to part with the secrets of his glazes, which he took with him to the grave.

By Hammer and Hand2010

Black MDF33 x 100 x 5 cm

Courtesy the artists / Ceri Hand Gallery£2500 + VAT

50

Ged Quinn

I Am an Ear of Corn in Sun and Wind2010

Oil on canvas200 x 323 cm

Courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, LondonNot for sale

Born in 1963 in Liverpool, Ged Quinn studied at the Ruskin in Oxford, the Slade School of Art in London, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Quinn’s connections to the West Midlands come through his family, his father being stationed in Coventry during WWII, where he met Ged’s mother, who was working in a munitions factory. After the war, Ged’s father worked in a textiles firm in Birmingham for the next 25 years, during which time the young artist got to know the city intimately, spending a lot of time at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Referencing neo-classical painting such as the landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Quinn injects these pastoral idylls with strange allegorical imagery, weird symbols and incongruous yet mystical motifs. Writing about Quinn’s work in a publication about the artist, Michael Bracewell asks: “What then, is the viewer to make of these meticulously detailed, alternately despairing and cartoon-like, sadistic and mysterious, richly atmospheric and art historically role playing paintings?” For The Witching Hour, Quinn presents the awe-inspiring work from 2010, I An an Ear of Corn in Sun and Wind, in which a peculiar apparition floats inside a decrepit house as pigeons circle overhead. Nearby, a naked boy stands holding a hammer and chisel, as if he has just sculpted the bust of a black bird next to him. Quite what is going on, or what it might mean, remains unclear...

Represented by Wilkinson, London, he has had several solo exhibitions at the gallery as well as at venues including Spike Island in Bristol and Tate St. Ives. He has participated in group shows at institutions such as The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.

52

David Rowan

Photographer David Rowan was born in Birmingham in 1972, where he continues to live and work. He has recently exhibited in exhibitions at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Baskerville House, also in Birmingham. One of his major bodies of work in recent years is Mass (Future Deleted), a project in which he has followed the destruction and regeneration of Masshouse Circus in the centre of Birmingham. A portfolio of this work has become part of the permanent photographic archives of the city, and some of the works have been exhibited at the prestigious photographic festival Rencontres d’Arles in France.

The body of work for which he has perhaps become best known, however, is the Pacha Kuti series, documenting classified underground environments beneath the streets of Birmingham. Capturing the extraordinary and usually hidden accomplishments of civil engineering and architecture, Rowan’s photographs are dark, powerful and memorable images of the city’s civic underworld. Work from this series won the best in show prize at the 2007 Birmingham Open exhibition at BMAG, and was subsequently published in the Guardian.

For The Witching Hour, Rowan presents works from his recent series Abandon in Place, a body of work taken at the former Birmingham Post and Mail building. Designed by John H. D. Madin and Partners in 1960, it is famous for having been one of the earliest examples of the “podium and block” style of architecture, inspired by Lever House in New York. The architects were later responsible for designing Birmingham Central Library – a building that perhaps has as many detractors as it has admirers. The Post and Mail building was home to the Birmingham Post and Evening Mail newspapers from its inauguration in 1964. In Rowan’s series, the underground publishing and print area has been photographed, capturing it in its faded glory. The building did not last long into the new Millennium, having been fully demolished by 2006. Colmore Plaza, replete with office buildings now stands where the building once was. Rowan’s photographs could be scenes from a film, imbued with an eerie, sinister atmosphere – a sense generated by knowing that the building is no longer in use and has come to the end of its working life.

Abandon in PlacePM 0003, PM 0008, PM 0014

C-type photographic archival prints76.2 x 101.6 cm each

Exhibition copiesCourtesy Visual, copyright the artist

Edition for sale: C-type gloss archival prints on metallic paper 30.5 x 40.6 cm (35.6 x 45.7 cm paper size)

Edition of 10 + 2 AP£150 for 3 prints (unframed)

54

Elizabeth Rowe

Will go underground2010

Ink on newspaper 60 x 75 cm (framed)

Courtesy the artist£1500 (framed)

Born in 1974, Elizabeth Rowe is an artist based in Birmingham. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including RAID Projects, Los Angeles, the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, and Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam, and is currently featured in the Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition in London. She has also participated in group exhibitions including at Castle & Elephant, Coventry, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Embassy, Edinburgh, and International Project Space at Bournville Centre for Visual Arts, Birmingham. She has been featured in art fairs including Zoo, represented by Eastside Projects, Birmingham, and DC Dusseldorf Contemporary, represented by Moot, Nottingham. She has works in the collection of the New Art Gallery Walsall, the collection of David Lachapelle and in a number of other private collections, as well as having undertaken residencies in Rotterdam, Dudley, Derbyshire and Los Angeles.

Rowe often works with printed matter such as newspapers and magazines, postcards and other found materials to create collages, assemblages, installations and sculptural configurations. Colourful, curious, complex and captivating, the works mix together all manner of imagery, from the sublime to the ridiculous, whether pairing up giant waterlilies with imagery of women working in factories in the 19th century, converting a picture of a ship leaving port into a spaceship, or peppering a postcard of a 1960s housing estate with the heads of sculptures from antiquity. With reference to movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus, Rowe’s practice is a low-fidelity, low-budget form of appropriation from the world of visual culture, creating critically stimulating works that are as engaging as they are attractive.

For The Witching Hour, the artist presents Will go underground, one of the most recent works from her ongoing series of newspaper drawings, in which the artist appropriates imagery published in newspapers and magazines and draws or paints over them in intricate and interesting ways – sections are obscured or eradicated completely, others left visible or partly so, yet others changed beyond recognition. The resulting images are quite different from their original sources, usually transforming something from the already extraordinary real world into something even more spectacular and at the same time odd, metaphysical, fantastical and poetic. The image may be familiar to some visitors to the exhibition, as it was recently presented as a large-scale billboard poster in Birmingham city centre as part of a public art project commissioned by EC-Arts.

56

George Shaw

The Last Summer2006

Humbrol enamel on board115.5 x 152 cm

Courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, LondonPrice on request

George Shaw was born in Coventry in 1966. He studied fine art at Sheffield Polytechnic before completing an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 1998. Although now based in Devon, his practice continues to be devoted to painting Tile Hill, the town in which he grew up in Coventry during the 1970s. Painted with his trademark humbrol paints (usually reserved for model aircrafts and fantasy figurines) the images he painstakingly creates are dreary yet exquisite, drab yet beautiful depictions of the suburban environment, from housing estates to pubs, woodland to semi-industrial scrubland. They are often melancholy, eerie, alienating images, with few signs of life, and even the paintings of sunny days are imbued with a sense of sadness, though they are not devoid of affinity and affection.

For The Witching Hour, Shaw presents a work entitled The Last Summer from 2006, depicting, in the foreground, a row of run-down garages with presentable though tatty doors and a corrugated iron roof. Behind the garages is a block of flats. While not an idyllic place in which to live, the building doesn’t look in bad condition – the windows aren’t boarded up, there is no visible graffiti: we’ve all seen – or lived in – worse. The scene could be almost anywhere, in countless towns around the UK, and despite its air of underlying danger, for someone it’s home.

In 2003 Shaw had a major solo exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham, and in a home-coming of sorts, next year returns to the West Midlands with another significant solo exhibition at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry. Represented by Wilkinson, London, Shaw is also currently exhibiting in the British Art Show at Nottingham Contemporary. He has previously exhibited at institutions including The Whitechapel, the New Art Gallery Walsall, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Tate Britain.

58

Toby de Silva

From the series ImmortalSaint ValantinusSaint Deodatus

Saint AlexanderSaint Gratian

2010Digital C-type prints

70 x 60 cm each (framed)Edition of 10 + 2 APs

Courtesy the artist Price: £950 each (unframed) / £1500 each (framed)

West Midlands photographer Toby de Silva was born in 1972 and studied photography at Falmouth School of Art before going on to complete an MA in fine art photography at the University of Westminster. Based between Herefordshire, London and Tokyo, he often travels around the world to locations in which to take photographs for his projects. 2009 was a significant year for the artist, nominated for a number of prizes and taking part in four exhibitions: P3 Gallery’s Westphoto Photography Prize show; Vision 2009, BJP International Photography Award shortlisted artists show; the Association of Photographers Gallery open show; and the exhibition Hungry at Wolverhampton Art Gallery for winners of the Rhubarb-Rhubarb bursaries. In addition to these he was also a finalist for the Guardian and the Royal Photographic Society’s Joan Wakelin Award.

De Silva’s projects are almost always dark and sinister, though often not without a sense of understated, wry humour. In one project he travelled around the States to photograph houses that had appeared in horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist and Poltergeist. In another series, the artist took to the streets of Whitechapel, photographing the locations of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. In an equally macabre series, de Silva photographed the Aokigahara Forest – a place infamous for being the most popular site for suicide in the world. Needless to say, it’s a somewhat bleak, sad set of images.

For The Witching Hour, de Silva presents four photographic prints from the Immortal series, depicting the skeletons of martyred saints. The skeletons are said to have been taken from the catacombs of Rome in the 17th century and taken to a remote church on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic where they were dressed in the most lavish regalia of the period. Photographed in situ at the church, de Silva captures the striking relics, dramatically illuminated in their peculiar costumes and postures – as if some sort of Madame Tussauds for the cult of saints.

60

Gillian Wearing

Lily Cole2009

C-Type print61 x 48 cm

65 x 52 cm (framed)Edition of 175

Courtesy the artist, Counter Editions andMaureen Paley, London

Available from Counter Editions (www.countereditions.com)£750 (unframed) / £930 (framed)

Born in Birmingham in 1963 and currently based in London, Gillian Wearing is one of the most internationally respected contemporary artists to have come from the West Midlands. Having originally studied at Chelsea School of Art, she went on to graduate with a BA in fine art from Goldsmiths in 1990. Rising to prominence as one of the artists that became popularly known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), she featured in the seminal exhibition Sensation, which in many ways came to define British art of the 1990s and established contemporary art from Britain as a dynamic force on the international stage. Since winning the Turner Prize in 1997, she has had more than 30 solo exhibitions, including at major institutions such as Serpentine Gallery, London, Kiasma, Helsinki, MCA, Chicago, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and a forthcoming show at K21, Dusseldorf, which will be touring to the Whitechapel in 2012. The large number of group exhibitions in which her work has been presented effectively offers an atlas to contemporary art institutions around the world. In the West Midlands she has exhibited at Ikon Gallery and the New Art Gallery Walsall (most recently in this summer’s exhibition Behind the Mask). She is represented by Maureen Paley, London.

Wearing works with film and photographic media to explore social, cultural and psychological aspects of people’s lives, whether members of the public who are invited to take part in projects in response to adverts in newspapers, fly-on-the-wall documentary footage of teenagers drinking heavily and socialising in bars and clubs, or staged video portraits of people in police uniforms. In her latest project, Wearing’s first feature-length film, the artist asked the question “If you were to play a part in a film, would you be yourself or a fictional character” in the form of a newspaper advert, selecting seven participants from the many people who applied. After a method acting course in which the participants developed their characters by mixing aspects of their own lives and invented elements, a film evolved that is between documentary and fiction. For The Witching Hour, Wearing presents Lily Cole, a striking print of the celebrated British model wearing a mask made of her own face. Unsettling, uncanny and hauntingly beautiful, the limited edition print has become an iconic image of the interplay between outward appearance and our interior lives in an age obsessed with the media, fame and image.

62

Stuart Whipps

Basildon NewtownFrom the series New Wooabbeleri

2010Silkscreen print

76 x 99 cmEdition of 9 (No.1)

£700 (unframed)

Born in Birmingham in 1979, Stuart Whipps is one of the most accomplished and respected photographers based in the West Midlands today. He has had solo exhibitions at Oriel Davies, Newtown, Wales, the New Art Gallery, Walsall, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, and in 2011 will be having a significant solo show at Ikon, Birmingham. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the International Project Space, Bournville, Birmingham, Rencontres d’Arles, France, The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, and Liangzhou Photo Festival, China, among others. Having obtained a first class degree from the University of Wolverhampton, he has since gone on to win the Observer Hodge Award and most recently, the 2009 East International Award.

Whipps first came to prominence in the West Midlands with the exhibition Ming Jue at the New Art Gallery Walsall, curated by Deborah Robinson, in 2008. Whipps had been photographing the MG Rover plant in Longbridge, Birmingham, since 2004. The following year, the factory’s 6000 staff were informed of its temporary closure, which turned out to be the beginning of its eventual closure. The body of work thus evolved into a process of documenting the demise of the plant. Whipps was invited to photograph the new production factory in Nanjing, China – images which were shown alongside those of Longbridge in the exhibition and accompanying publication. Whipps has since made bodies of work about Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia, Wales, about Herbert Manzoni, former city engineer and surveyor of Birmingham, and a project related to the speeches, interviews and statements of Margaret Thatcher. It is clear that Whipps’s interests extend into the realms of politics, sociology, architectural history, urban planning and beyond.

For The Witching Hour, Whipps presents two works from his recent exhibition New Wooabbeleri at Focal Point Gallery, an exhibition that explored postwar developments along the north and south banks of the River Thames. In addition to photographs of the developments, Whipps presented silkscreen prints based on the urban planners’ plans for locations along the Thames, scrambled up by means of a computer script. Also on display was documentation relating to the developments, the text obscured so as to leave only elevated viewpoints of the regeneration area. The project presents a cryptic survey of modern towns that are built from scratch – a theme that invites interesting ideas in relation to the architectural uncanny. New Wooabbeleri was one of the 53 names suggested for what has become known as Thamesmead.

Basildon 001From the series New Wooabbeleri

2010Photographic print

125 x 100 cmEdition of 6 (No.1)

£1200 (framed)

64

Editor: Matt PriceAssociate Editor: Nicola ShipleyAssistant Editors: Peter Collins and Katja OgrinDesign: Matt Price and Kerry ThomasEssay: © Freya Smaill, 2010Produced by: Fused magazine on behalf of Arts & BusinessPrinted by: Stephens and GeorgeCover image: Toby de Silva, Saint Gratian, 2010

Art of Ideas gratefully acknowledges the support of C’Art for transportation of art works in The Witching Hour.

Published in 2010

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-9565380-9-3

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ISBN: 978-0-9565380-9-3Price: £6.00