The Logic of Basho < Here's Looking at You Kid > at Galleri Pictura, Sweden

The installation in Sweden varied a bit from the one at GASP in Portsmouth by the shape of the enclosure being a Pentagon, the Peepholes also being lined with white rabbit fur and that we added sets of headphones in the projection room in addition to having the sound played over speakers.

The exhibition at Galleri Pictura in Lund Sweden will be up until Jan 15th, 2011

To see more images from both exhibitions go to my home page at www.josefinaposch.com

The Portsmouth sculptures looked great in the Swedish UV light

The Projection of the Live streaming web cams from inside the Pentagon 

The Broadcasting Laptop with the peer-to-peer software application running

Installing at Galleri Pictura

Just a few days after I arrived back in Gothenburg, Sweden it was time to load up the pentagon structure I had stored at my fathers place in Bollebygd and drive down to install my exhibition at Galleri Pictura in Lund. The Vernissage or Opening Reception is tomorrow Friday the 10th of Dec from 6-8pm.

Loading the pentagon boards

Driving down to Lund on the Swedish winter roads

The landscape is changing even though Lund is only 3 hrs south

Galleri Pictura's Peter Gerdman & Sofia Landström

Galleri Pictura poster advertising my exhibition

The street of the gallery in Lund

The crate with my sculptures from Portsmouth arrived well in Sweden. Even the Basho Tattoo Logo Posters were intact but someone had opened up the Peephole that we had covered up with a piece of board. Seems everyone is a voyeur after all, but I already knew that.

The notorious crate from Art Space Portsmouth 

Installing the exhibition

The figures installed

The Logic of Basho < Here's Looking at You Kid > at GASP

The entrance at GASP

The small side door leading into the exhibition space

The half hexagon enclosure

Through the Peephole

Inside the enclosure

The video projection of the live web streaming from inside the enclosure

All images by Katayoun Dowlatshahi

Last day in Portsmouth and Images from Preview night

It is the last day of my three month residency and I'm on my way to Heathrow leaving for Sweden later today. The sculptures were shipped on Wednesday and I am crossing my fingers that they will arrive in Sweden on time since already on Monday I am going down to Lund to mount the installation at Gallri Pictura in Lund, stay tuned for more on that later.

I had a fantastic residency and extremely happy with how the whole project developed especially considering the residency was only for three months and I am looking forward to  streaming the live video back to Aspex Gallery on the 9th of December. 

Portrait by Katayoun Dowlatshahi

In the meantime here are some images from the Preview at GASP. Images of the actual  installation will follow soon.

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Exhibition Opening Day

At the moment we are broadcasting the video stream from the installation here at GASP to Hanare Project in Kyoto, Japan where it is almost 9 in the evening check it out on their blog here.

Image of the projected stream in Kyoto

The preview here at GASP (Gallery at Art Space Portsmouth) is tonight from 6.30 - 8.30
and more information can be found at ASP web site here.

The Day Before the Exhibition Opens

Tomorrow Friday November 19th is the preview of my exhibition " The Logic of Basho < Here's Looking at You Kid > " and already at 11 am we are starting to broadcast with Hanare Projects in Japan. As always time seems to run faster as the opening of exhibitions gets closer and today was no exception.

Me fine tuning the sculptures

Neil Hardcastle cutting out his tattoo design logo

Photographer Malcolm Wells observing  

Tattoo Design for the Exhibition

One of the things I noticed when I did the body-castings for the sculptures was that it seemed that every person from Portsmouth had one or more tattoos. This spurred discussions regarding the history of tattoos in Portsmouth and I found out that there will even be a Tattoo Convention here this spring. Even though I decided not to go as far as Katayoun suggested: that I should actually tattoo my sculptures I instead opted to incorporate a tattoo design element into the enclosure part of the installation. 

The tattoo, that is designed by Neil Hardcastle of  warehaus studio  specifically for my art project, contains the title of the exhibition and will replace the Adam and Eve Dürer silkscreen I used on the Pentagon for the " In My Secret Life - Det Stora Vidunderliga ".

Tattoo design by Neil Hardcastle www.warehausstudio.com

Troutbeck Fundraising Dinner in London

This past Sunday my Italian, but now UK based friends Cristiana and Francesco hosted the first of a series of micro-fundraising dinners that aspire to democratize the arts grant process by creating opportunities for artists and supporters of culture to meet face-to-face in the intimate context of dinner. 

Cristiana Bottigella & Francesco Stoccchi "Troutbeck Dinner Project" Founders

"Often artists need a minimal amount of funding that allows them to get a project started and put a process into action. The Troutbeck Dinner Project aims to help assist projects at this crucial stage by providing a framework where artists can share their ideas and raise funds for their work."

Beth Shiner in red left and Jason Waite seated right presenting their project "Trip to Iraq"

This dinner was in support of the "Trip to Iraq" project that Beth Shiner and Jason Waite, two recent Goldsmiths graduates who are planning on meeting artists, art students and assess the potential for future collaboration in Iraq.

More about the "Troutbeck Dinner Project"

Update on the Streaming Project

Simultaneously to my development of the assembling of the body castings into full figure sculptures, Art Space's Mike Blackman and I have been continuing working on the live video streaming component of the project . The program that Mike has created is using a new technology within Flash 10 that allows peer to peer broadcasting with relatively small means. The idea is to broadcast live video from three webcams that are being inter-cut dictated by a soundtrack that I created. 

This Thursday we test broadcasted to Hanare Projects which is the gallery space in Kyoto, Japan that will live stream the footage from Gasp here in Portsmouth on the opening day of the exhibition. We were quite pleased with the results but realized it still needed quite some tweaking when it comes to resolution vs fps. 

" An important message about the arts by artist David Shrigley "

Progress of the Casting Project

These past few weeks I finished up casting into the body part molds and have now started de-molding which means my studio at Art Space finally looks like a proper sculptors space.

The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli, 1550 by Enea Vico 1523–1567

The process contains several steps beginning with covering the mold with a release wax then casting a face coat of the Jesmonite resin, reinforce it with fiberglass and build up layers until a thickness of about 3-4 mm. Leaving it to cure for a few days I then de-mold the pieces, heat them up and remove the wax residue. After this they are ready to be assembled into the full figures, which I started on this last few days.

More London Exhibitions

Marina Abramovic seemed to be everywhere these days and to my delight her Lisson Gallery exhibition contained several of her earlier work from the 1970's. A personal favorite of mine is the "Light/Dark" video where she and her former collaborator Ulay take turn in slapping each other at an increasing speed until Abramovic ducks, avoids the slap thus ending the circle.

At the White Cube Mason's Yard, I got completely engulfed in Christian Marclay's new video piece "The Clock" that oddly both heighten my awareness of time while at the same time completely losing my sense of it as a linear occurence. The video encompasses thousands of film segments that contains a clock, edited together to a 24 hour long piece where the clocks on screen in fact shows the actual time.

In the Louise Bourgeois - Fabric Works exhibition at Hauser & Wirth one of her mother spider was hoovering over the art crowd in the night.

Before leaving town I also took the chance to see my fellow Swede but now UK based Karin Kihberg and Reuben Henry's exhibition at Danielle Arnaud. Previously I had only seen their video "Inbindable Volume (2010)" on a monitor and it was great to see it as intended - projected and I am looking forward to when we at Galleri Box in Gothenburg, Sweden (where I am a boardmember) will exhibit it this spring. In fact you will also be able to see their work in April right here in Portsmouth at the aspex gallery where they will have a solo Exhibition as 1st Prize winners of the Emergency 4. 

Karin Kihberg and Reuben Henry "Inbindable Volume 2010"

Shanghai-London

This past week I spend a few days in London trying to catch a few of all the exhibitions that are up because of the Frieze Art Fair as well as taking the opportunity to meet with friends that were in town for the same reason.

Hu Yun & Biljana Ciric "Stairways to heaven?" 

Meeting up with Shanghai based curator Biljana Ciric (who brought the first ever solo show of Yoko Ono to China in 2008) and artist Hu Yun, I naturally enquired about the Ai Weiwei Sunflower seed installation at Tate Modern since they had been at the preview. One of the first things Biljana mentioned was the incredible sound that was made  when people were walking on the seeds, crushing them and how they eventually would be turned into dust.

Unfortunately I did not see it before the exhibition was closed for entry (for health-safety reasons) and can now only be viewed from the bridge or from about one meter away. The museum gurards did sporadicly offer one seed for a closer inspection to the audience who carefully and admiringly passed this "chosen one" around and  back to the guard who placed it back with the billion others. It was actually quite a symbolic act, but probably not the kind Ai Weiwei intended. 

Admittedly the experience of the piece would have been completely different if I had been able to walk through the sea of seeds but nevertheless the impact of the vast amount of handmade seeds was still striking. There is also an interesting documentary showing the amazing process of how the seeds were made in  Jingdezhen basically employing the whole town for the production.

Artist Hu Yun is by the way currently an Artist-in-Residence at Gasworks in which he is conducting a practice based research in the chinese drawing archives at the Museum of Natural History in London. An interesting project and I am very curious to see what he will create with this material. Someone to watch.