switch2010

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switch: promotes and shows contemporaryvisual art in a public context

the scale of things

Imagine you are walking down the road, your collar turned up against the chill, minding puddles. Unconsciously you walk into the wind with nothing to guide you but the habit of this ordinary every-day experience. It is a dark autumn evening and the moon is just a sliver. You turn the corner, the same one perhaps you turn every evening whilst taking the dog for a walk or on your way home from work. You pass a shop window and tonight something stops you. You stand, loitering really, and watch the images moving in front of you.

It’s November and you are at switch, an international showcase of contemporary visual art taking place this year in the towns of Nenagh and Bangor. You may have read about this in a publication or heard of it through word of mouth from a neighbour. You may have even interacted with it in previous years.

For eight days, eight artists from around the globe invite you into their minds and introduce you to their ideas of scale and its relation to measurement, language, proportion or time. Shop windows previously occupied and transparent are activated, serving to display contemporary visual art. These artists communicate: they extract, arrange, manipulate, edit, produce and reproduce, juggle, document and create whilst bringing us - the public - into their world.

Communication and the speed at which ideas can be exchanged change the scale of things and in this way switch is no different.

Diana Champa

2010

McLean FahnestockIndeterminate Form 0 01

Simultaneously a short and infinite loop, Indeterminate Form 0 addresses scale as a form of measurement of not merely size but of duration, difficulty, and feat – as well as a tool of balance. Focusing on moments in athletic competition where motion and stillness are in a hard-fought equilibrium, the series “Indeterminate Forms” is made up of seven separate video loops that take their names and number designations from the mathematical terms for infinity. Indeterminate Form 0 takes its content from a move in dressage called a piaffe in which the horse trots in place.

As in much of McLean Fahnestock’s work, this piece utilizes appropriated footage. In highly editing events that already have a measure of familiarity, she seeks to open new windows into the private moments of public performance.

McLean Fahnestock is based in Long Beach, Ca, USA.

Thomas HorakGlühbirnen 02

Thomas Horak fabricates replicas of seemingly plausible natural scenes using materials that have been through human processes. He constructs a dysfunctional simulation of nature. In the piece “Glühbirnen” which is the German word for lightbulb and literally translates to “Glowing Pear,” Horak portrays the struggle to “make things work.” The stark tree hung with glass pears wired to an electric generator which initially refuses to function. Once it is finally running, the fruit bulbs tentatively flicker to life before their glow smoothens. With time, one by one the lightbulbs fall off the tree to the ground, like ripe pears. This crude replication of a tree bearing fruit is stripped of the original purpose of procreating, for the benefit of human pleasure.

Filmed in the Campsies South of Strathblane

55.978° -4.303°

Thomas Horak is based in the UK, Austria & the Czech Republik.

Martijn KuijtenA song to Dylan 03

A song to Dylan displays a projection of an artist that sings a silent song to the streets. A song to the people he meets, who don’t listen anymore. “But lovers & liars are both much the same. We are all playing this ridiculous game”. These days life runs two steps ahead of us and we all just try to keep up. He tries to find his place in this world with a constant thought, that he just wants to sing.

Martijn Kuijten is based in Gemert, Netherlands.

04Jeff LangilleWaterfall, 2009

Waterfall, 2009 is a 26-minute single-shot video. Beginning with a view of the top of a 335-meter waterfall, the camera tilts slowly down to reveal the sinuous falls and finally a public viewing platform at the bottom, a banal conclusion to the excruciatingly slow revelation of the waterfall. The durational aspect of the work is an invitation to consider both the physical scale (and beauty) of the waterfall and conventional expectations about viewing time for moving images.

My work in video investigates ‘place’, specifically Vancouver’s urban and rural topographies. I usually work in locations that contain evidence of human presence but are in transition: building sites, demolition sites, vacant lots, overgrown gardens, disused industrial land on the outskirts of the city. Culture encroaches on nature. Nature encroaches on culture.

Central to this work is the treatment of time as a material—I work exclusively with single unedited camera shots. I am interested in how duration and stillness in a video projection can evoke a sense of place, of presentness for the observer.

Jeff Langille is based in Vancouver, Canada.

Robert Ladislas DerrMan in Relation to Men 05

Man in Relation to Men explores the stereotypical reference of masculinity using an array of male action figures from diverse eras. The linear nature of the video forces the comparison of one figure in relation to the next. As the accumulation of figures progresses them towards the lens of the camera, assessments are to be expected with the addition of each new figure in relation to the entire group. Type, era, genre, and even function are just a few comparisons that can be made. The concept of man is derived from the symbolic concept of men and vice-versa. This video explores the complex and ever-changing role of masculinity and man through the commercial commoditization of man.

Robert Ladislas Derr is based in Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Wolfgang LehrnerTrident 06

Moving Images Reality as a movie. Movie as reality.

What I see, I see because it makes a difference – that is the classical thesis of cognitive science. Something moves, the rest is quiet. I suddenly recognize a structure in something without order: a cube among circles…

The foundation of this idea is the world as tableau. A world that is structured, arranged in juxtaposition, classified into foreground and background. I can distinguish variations and differences as I overlook this tableau or at least a crucial part of it. When seeing a relevant difference between movement in the foreground and the statics of the background and comparing these with known patterns I retrieve this information: the rabbit is running.

The position of the spectator’s privileged vantage point which once allowed us to sit or stand quietly in front a tableau can only be taken in hypothetically as the tableau itself changed. It has become partitioned, less comprehensible and is more cluttered than it used to be. Differences appear and vanish as images come and go. These images are images of images, sequences of references, resemblances and short-term links...

ACHIM WOLLSCHEID, Frankfurt a. M., 2010

Wolfgang Lehrner is based in Vienna Austria.

Brigid McLeerFreighter Drawing (01.13mins) 07

Freighter Drawing was shot in Istanbul on the Bosphorus, that infamous narrow channel of water that today plays host to dozens of container ships daily. This manipulated small piece of footage transforms the hulking mass and obduracy of a single container ship into a ghostly, almost unreadable presence. More like a mental image than something really there, it nonetheless persists, like a fleeting memory charged with a strange cathexis.

The video is part of a series of works in which container ships and shipping containers themselves feature (both as moving image works and sculpture). However instead of being presented directly these massive structures are dematerialized or fragmented to become more insubstantial, though still pervasive, elements. In this way their visual presence purposely belies the actual scale of our dependence upon these vehicles of global trade, and equally the enormous scale of their real presence in the ongoing procedures of capitalism. Like a kind of blind spot, they are there but not there, their cumulative effects strategically forgotten in favour of the comfort of our individual lives.

The video exists as part of a suite of videos (all shot in Istanbul) titled The Other Side of Shouting Men and has been shown along with an ongoing work The Face of Another which explores these themes in relation to Western culture’s reliance on the ‘myth’ of the individual. This is the first time the video will be seen as a stand-alone work in a public site.

Brigid McLeer is based in London, UK.

Holger Mohauptcows 08

Cows are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius. Cattle are raised as livestock for meat (beef and veal), as dairy animals for milk and other dairy products, and as draft animals (pulling carts, plows and the like).

Cows is a tribute to the 1.3 billion cows on planet earth and their very personal contribution for the benefits of the human race. Cows was originally made in 1996 during the first mad-cow disease epidemic. In the United Kingdom, the country worst affected, more than 179,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million slaughtered during the eradication program.

Holger Mohaupt is based in Glasgow, Scotland.

Nenagh, C

o. Tipperary

Ban

gor,

Co.

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a special thanks to the business communities in both Nenagh & Bangor for their generous support in kind

Bangor &HolywoodTown Centre Management

North Down

arts & Culture

Borough Council

switch2010

1st - 7th November 2010, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary14th - 21st November 2010, Bangor, Co. Downw w w . s - w - i - t - c - h . o r g

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