Thursday 19 January 2017, 7.30pm
On UK shores for the first time, visual and sound artist Ross Manning is an illustrious figure in the Australian art world whose background in improvised music and noise has led him to create kinetic sound sculptures which function as automaton prose. In an exciting new collaboration the meeting of London based sound stalwarts Dan Hayhurst (Sculpture) and Graham Dunning promises an onslaught of deteriorated beats and hissing analogue machines. Expanded cinema and sound artist Sally Golding presents shifting hallucinogenic sonified light fields, and UK electronic music producer Spatial fills in the cracks providing noisy and dancey DJ delights.
UNCONSCIOUS ARCHIVES
Unconscious Archives (UA) is a live performance series foregrounding an artistic discourse examining the synergies and dissimilarities which define both live film and sound art. UA aims to generate a responsive curatorial platform for artist film works which are performative or expanded in nature, alongside sound works by sonic artists whose work encompasses visual or sculptural elements.
Ross Manning is a visual artist and musician who stages spatial interventions using everyday objects: fluorescent tubes, ceiling fans, household twine, brown wrapping paper, analogue overhead projectors and detritus from discontinued data projectors. Manning started creating kinetic sculptures specifically for their sonic potential, into which environmental influences were often incorporated. From soundwaves to light waves, Manning has an uncanny ability to foreground the hidden beauty in audiovisual technology, an exploration helped by the practical experiences of his previous job as a gallery installer and repair technician. Manning has a long dialogue with sound art in the Australian scene operating under projects such as 4 Layers Of Nine, and in Brisbane noise duo Faber Castell (with Alan Nguyen), and more recently with Sky Needle (with Joel Stern, Alex Cuffe and Sarah Byrne) - a conceptual rock band from Australia performing primitive hypnotic music played on built instruments. Utilising broken electronics, hand made instruments, custom electronics and electro-magnetic recordings, Manning has an uncanny ability to slice open new parts of sound and light spectrums, revealing both frenzied and sublime textures. Ross Manning’s album Interlacing is released on Australian label Room40.
“Manning’s work threatens to lift the veil from the fetishised consumer electronics on which we are dependent, subtly repositioning the technologies that operate as the unseen ‘given’ in our daily lives. In place of the corporate software-hardware standards that are now so normative as to be effectively coercive, we are presented with a quiet unworking - an alternative emotion of objects. What is highlighted, throughout Manning’s work, is the ongoing, unresolved question about the dynamics of power between technology and contemporary life.” - Danni Zuvela, Milani Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2012
“Ross Manning is one of Australia’s best kept secrets.” - Room40, 2015
Sally Golding is a British-Australian artist whose work considers participation and liveness in audiovisual art as a mechanism for shared experiences and dialogues within technological contexts. Golding’s audiovisual performances are edgy and intense in nature– unravelling in the style of a ‘happening’ to incorporate aspects of the performance space, blending discordant sonics and harsh lighting to investigate the social potential of opto-sonics. She has performed for forums including Tate Britain, Serralves Museum (PT), Digital Culture Centre (MX), Whitstable Biennale (UK), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CAM2 (ES), Sound of Stockholm, Australian Centre For the Moving Image, KRAAK (BE), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Abandon Normal Devices (UK), SONICA (SI), Cafe OTO (UK) and Contemporary Art Centre (LT). Golding’s participatory installations, shown at the Institute of Modern Art (AU), Contemporary Art Tasmania and South London Gallery, are audiovisual compositions which spatialise the viewer’s presence via reflection and image capture, questioning states of perception across contemporary portraiture. Golding has collaborated with Joel Stern (AU) as the punk film/sound duo Abject Leader, and with electronic music producer and creative technologist Spatial (UK). Golding has been featured by The Wire, Millennium Film Journal, Tate Modern and Palgrave Macmillan, and received an Oram Award 2017 (New BBC Radiophonic Workshop/PRS Foundation) for innovation in sound and creative technologies, and is part of the innovative SHAPE platform 2019 dedicated to promoting and exchange for musicians and interdisciplinary artists in Europe. Golding is also the curator of the event and festival platform Unconscious Archives (UK), and previously OtherFilm (AU). She has written on audiovisual culture and digital art for the San Francisco Cinematheque (USA) and Austrian Cultural Forum London (Parsing Digital, 2018).
“The British born, London based Australian artist has created dozens of installations and performances in recent years, stradling lines between expanded cinema and sound art. She ceremonially piles dizzying sensations onto audiences, from the trembling light of multiple projectors to the serrated noise pulsations of the scores”. – Tristan Bath (The Wire, June 2016, issue 388)
“...[Golding’s] performances resemble a nineteenth century séance, careering between elegance and precarious awkwardness as noisy awe-inspiring spectacle.” – Steven Ball (Senses of Cinema, 2016)
Artist website - http://sallygolding.com/
Curatorial - http://unconscious-archives.org/
Graham Dunning is self-taught as an artist and musician having studied neither discipline academically. His work explores sound as texture, timbre and something tactile, drawing on bedroom production, tinkering and recycling found objects. He has performed solo and in ensembles across the UK, and Europe, and shown solo sound installations in the UK, New Zealand and USA. He teaches Experimental Sound Art at the Mary Ward Centre in London and also gives various independent workshops. Dunning has released through Entr’acte, Seagrave, Tombed Visions and more.
Dan Hayhurst, sonic section of AV duo, Sculpture, performs structurally unstable material from his new solo LP, Critter Party, assimilating elements of technological psychedelia, noise, media collage and shape shifting electronics. This is music that operates at the point where patterns emerge from chaos (or perhaps the point of disintegration). Emotional and direct performance is skewed through a matrix of tape decks, samplers and electronic instruments. Warped guitar and percussion moiré meet fragments of media detritus and electronic sound. Post-criticality... critters just want to party.
London electronic music producer and low-end provocateur Spatial (aka Matt Spendlove) weaves together a mix of dubbed-out techno and rave experiments, alongside fanciful noise in his dj sets which offer both creative musings and dancey moments. In his own live sets and recordings Spatial approaches low frequency vibrations with a minimalist’s scalpel, carving out space for snare grooves and tech house glitches. First emerging in 2008 as part of the UK’s nebulous post-dubstep brew, Spatial has a long history of making music that’s difficult to classify. Subverting established genre formulas and standard drum patterns, his dancefloor experiments pull from dubstep, garage, techno and vintage rave, ultimately sounding like none of them. The most adventurous Spatial creations have always surfaced via his own Infrasonics label, including the four-part 10” series that kicked off his career in 2008, and Emergence, his more recent triptych of nuanced EPs. Spatial has released on labels including Ultramajic, Well Rounded, WNCL and Niche N Bump. Spatial has created radio and live mixes for Red Bull Music Academy, Solid Steel, Secret 13, FACT Mag and Unsound.
“Matt Spendlove’s forward-thinking bass mutations have been mangling our brains since way back in 2008, and now he returns with the third part of his excellent Emergence series of EPs.” - FACT Mag (2016)
