AIR I BREATHE by Gazelli Art House

GA ZELLI A R T HOUSE PR ESEN TS FOUR

BE TO OC

FE BR UA RY

BO DH IL

U RK TH J A 25 R SP TH — 9 ILL O ST

MA RC D O W H 3 S 1 N T TO — E

2 0 TH AP H R

LO C AT I O N ROCHELLE SCHOOL ARNOLD CIRCUS LO N D O N E 2 7 E S

AR T

G LIN

SE AI PTEM R I BR BER EA 9 TH TH — E 7 TH

OF FIVE

25 TH — P 10 ED U FIR

SHOW

SHOWCASING NE W WOR KS BY YO O N J I N J U N G K AT E T E R R Y LIT TLEWHITEHE AD JOHN W YNNE

Pages 61 — 78

Foreword The flame is now burning, the earth has been ploughed, one can even assume that water quenched our thirst for knowledge. Yet we have reached an integral part to the journey of our inner exploration – without which the flame would burn out, the earth would cease to nurture and water would gradually evaporate. The translucent, light and intangible

Air I Breathe. Reminiscent of a newborn’s arrival – the first gasp for air is present in the works of Littlewhitehead, as expectations are broken and the viewer is encouraged to unravel the story free from pre-conceived judgments. The first glimpse of light is challenged by the conceptual pieces of Yoonjin Jung, exploring the reflections of light through her works and the visibility of the invisible. From being afloat we are elevated further by the delicate and interactive thread installation of Kate Terry, carefully concealed within the space, while the acute and unequivocal sound piece by John Wynne brings us back to our starting point – our very first breath of fresh air. Mila Askarova CEO & Founder Gazelli Art House 61

The Classical Elements Air I Breathe “All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you” (The Hollies 1974) Although the story that the artist JW Turner lashed himself to the mast of a sailing vessel is possibly apocryphal, it has captured our imagination. Battling the elements, he faced the gale that had whipped the sea into a frenzy of wind and spray hoping to understand the forces of nature that he wished to represent in paint. Air is invisible yet fills the space that surrounds us, its quality affects our health, its illumination and circulation alters our perception. As a classical element it evokes purity and vitality which brings to mind Süskind’s Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse, who wished to be borne to the highest summit of Pic du Canigou in the Pyrenees and left there in the “sharpest finest vital air for three whole weeks whereupon he would descend from the mountains …a strapping lad of twenty”. Whether still or agitated, spiritual or elemental, air is an invisible life force. The five artists in Air I Breathe all allude to air as a classical element by inciting our imagination and stimulating our senses. Yoonjin Jung’s installations and paintings embrace the power of the “invisible” in beautiful structures made from silk, chosen for its delicacy and transparency. “The sky itself consists of the air in between the water vapours… the spaces in the expanses [are] like my multiplelayered silk. The empty space looks empty to the naked eye, but it is, in fact, full of invisibilities”. For Jung, concepts of oriental painting (which she studied in Korea) are vital to her work, particularly the power of “empty space ”, which plays an important role in the composition… ”Empty space has potential power”. Light conditions are essential to how her work is perceived. “When I painted the night sky I thought of it as a sea I could jump into”. In Seeing the Unseen (Colour on silk, 2009) Jung describes how if one inserts a hand in the space between the blue silk and the wall the blue spills onto it in a magical way. Rather than being a void, the space is an active area capable of animation and beauty. Her Seeing the Unseen (2011) installation is tethered, its physical movement arrested, the silk fixed to a wood support, but the changing reflections on the floor and wall as the light ebbs and flows play a vital role. Love and air, she suggests, are “invisible and intangible”, as are the insubstantial constituents intrinsic to her installation. What is important for Jung is the visual, conceptual and sensory journey as the “‘Empty space”’ radiates before our eyes with a tantalizing and illusionistic fragility. Air, light and perception are also essential elements in Kate Terry’s sculptures, with their “linearity and almost imperceptible evanescence”. Her Thread Installations are complex and skilled, requiring not only patience but geometrical precision. Both subtle and beautiful, the work INTRODUCTION

begins life as ordinary steel dressmakers’ pins and polyester sewing thread on spools. “I like the thread because of its everydayness… it’s not a spectacular material, both the coloured thread and the pins have a humble economy about them”. The thread’s properties enable her installations to be elusive or suddenly spring into our line of sight with an intense vibrancy, as the straight lines appear to bend, cross each other and mysteriously collect areas of colour. Each stage is essential; she maps the space, noting where the light gathers or the structural tension, in this case the steel bars criss-crossing the ceiling. She then ties each thread to a steel pin, leaving the end hanging to emphasise the handmade, and runs it across the space. The viewer can literally be “inside the sculpture” or suddenly be unexpectedly confronted. Variously “ethereal veils” or “hard-edged minimal drawings in space”, the threads travel through the air in a “field of visual interference”. It brings to mind both the fragility of nature and its robustness, its “phenomenological optical illusions” and atmospheric effects; how a beam of sunlight can illuminate specks of oscillating dust which a moment before had been invisible, or highlight a spider’s web. Terry’s “truth to materials” is vital to her contemporary minimalism. Finally, when she dismantles the installation the threads’ tension deflates and she is left with a tangled ball of colour caught on the pins, a poignant metaphor for how air can lift, suspend and then release. John Wynne’s sculptures also rely on the insubstantial properties of air. His sound installations disturb it, they swirl around us, penetrate and vibrate us, and confuse us. They make us think about the purity of a single note or the power of language and voice. We live with both direct and ambient sound. Sound is “carried away” or envelops us. When air is sucked out of us so is sound, death is the exhalation of breath not followed by an intake. Wynne distills sounds from diverse sources, “sculpting them into varied spatio-temporal forms”, both personal and poignant. In works such as Hearing Loss his dead father’s hearing aids communicate with each other; in Hearing Voices he recorded ‘clicklanguages’ in Botswana, the extraordinary power of voice and sound locked into a coded system. Whether through huge installations with three hundred speakers or a collection of beautiful resonant electronic notes and frequencies, he manipulates and propels sound through the air so we become receiving vessels. For Air I Breathe he worked in situ, listening to the architecture and the ambient sounds, synthesizing his own sounds in response, and experimenting with the relationships between pure tones to explore the space’s dead areas and echoing hollows. The very low and very high frequencies that fascinate him and the exterior and interior sounds he draws into his work disorientate us 63

INTRODUCTION

by making the walls seem acoustically transparent. He literally tunes the space, with the result that the sound physically affects the visitor. Cage-ian, or startlingly atonal, his sonic interventions are sometimes stealthily and silently there and at other times bold and clear, the result of both his aural findings, his finely tuned hearing and the power of the large speaker cones pushing the air around as sound spills into it and retreats. There are resonances in his work of the Dadaist Futurists or Cage’s silent work 4’33”, which compellingly argues that there is “never nothing to hear”: As we surrender ourselves, Wynne draws our audio attention in spectacular ways. Living in a city we are surrounded by sound, some of which we filter out – we are disturbed by distorted public announcements, electronic buzzes and ringtones; we retreat into our own space to listen to ipods on noise-cancelling headphones. We hear different languages and accents spoken at different pitches and frequencies, some carrying more than others. There is always sound being carried in the air and yet we often describe the sensation of “the world falling silent” as something portentous and threatening. “There’s something in the air” could symbolize the collaborative work of littlewhitehead (Craig Little and Blake Whitehead). The draught that suddenly wafts in a horror movie with some unspeakable and unseen presence, surreal manifestation of ‘humans’ that appear out of ‘thin air’, or body parts that have a will of their own. This is littlewhitehead’s territory. Their playful, serious and provocative sculptures are placed to disturb us or to make us laugh, albeit uneasily. A body lies face down in a drift of sand that slowly moves around it as if it is breathing and alive. In It happened in a corner 2007 a gathering of cast ‘hoodies’ gaze at something but as we approach there is nothing, just empty space. We are reminded of our own fears – voices, warnings, and media manipulation, the air being filled with menace. littlewhitehead play on our emotions; their work is cryptic, we bring our own instincts, fears and sensibilities as well as our understanding of absurd humour and horror. They embrace the uncanny and burn significant books, reducing the spoken words that have been pinned down in text to dust, but then reconstitute the remains into unreadable but powerful texts. Their burnt rooms such as Universal Sidereal remind us of the elemental ‘fanning of flames”, the power of fire and air heat and moisture. They create a space that, although looking like a burnt-out structure, is rather more “compelling and cinematic”. The space is eerie: “What has happened here?” “What has been extinguished?” We search for clues among the destroyed objects as they talk of filling their lungs with toxic fumes.

Divine and pure, elemental and filled with heat and moisture, our life’s blood, this is our air. In Air I Breathe we inhabit the artistic space, our breath literally sucking in the atmosphere and exhaling it as we step outside. We may hear a plane high above and remember that when the ash cloud stopped air traffic over London we suddenly noticed that the contrails and engine noise had disappeared, and that the world seemed a more silent place, the air purer. Dr Jean Wainwright Art historian and critic living in London. Senior Lecturer UCA.

“We prefer to shift the construction of the narrative onto the viewer, where the work stimulates their memory and forces them to construct a story …In this sense the narrative in the work is always multi-layered, fractional, nebulous and heavily dependent on one’s own private history.” INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Yoonjin Jung Seeing the Unseen, 2011 Colour on silk 37 = 37cm

Yoonjin Jung Seeing the Unseen, Experimental Model, 2010 Mixed Media Dimensions variable

Yoonjin Jung Seeing the Unseen, 2010 Mixed Media 387 = 488 = 256cm YOONJIN JUNG

YOONJIN JUNG

Kate Terry Plan for P, 2011 Pencil and coloured pencil on paper 28 = 40cm Kate Terry Thread Installation #18, 2008 Thread and pins

Kate Terry Thread Installation #22, 2009 Thread and pins

650 = 450 = 320cm

Dimensions variable

K AT E T E R R Y

Littlewhitehead Fur Suit, 2009 Mixed media, mechanical installation Lifesized

Littlewhitehead Untitled (mama this cloth smells like death), 2009 Spray paint and gloss on canvas 150 × 90cm

Littlewhitehead Universal Sidereal, 2010 Burnt wood, burnt objects 200 × 480 × 240cm

LIT TLEWHITEHEAD

John Wynne Hearing Voices (Detail), 2005 Flat speakers/photographs, amplifier & audio player

John Wynne Installation for 300 speakers, player piano and vacuum cleaner, 2010

Dimensions variable C.o. Brunei Gallery, London

Dimensions variable C.o. Saatchi Gallery, London

Untitled, 2004 Speakers, wire, amplifier & audio player Dimensions variable Kunstfabrik, Berlin

JOHN W YNNE

John Wynne Born in Zweibruken, Germany Lives and works in London

Kate Terry Lives and works in London 2002 Master of Fine Arts (MFA) University of Guelph, Canada 1999 BA (Hons) Fine Art: Sculpture, Manchester Metropolitan University

2007 PHD from Goldsmiths College, University of London

Solo Exhibitions 2011 Anspayaxw, Ksan Museum Gallery, Hazelton, British Columbia, Canada 2009 Untitled installation for 300 speakers, player piano and vacuum cleaner, Beaconsfield Soundtrap commission, London Wireframe, Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada 2008 Transplant, Collaborative installation w Tim Wainwright, The Nunnery, London and Beldam Gallery, Brunel University, Uxbridge Hearts, Lungs and Minds, (half-hour radio piece) BBC Radio 3 2007 Flow, Collaborative installation w Tim Wainwright, Old Operating Theatre Museum, London 2006 230 Unwanted Speakers (Walnut Grained Vinyl Veneered Particleboard Construction) , Hull Art Lab, Hull, 2005 Hearing Voices, Installation, Botswana National Museum, National Art Gallery of Namibia, Brunei Gallery, London Hearing Voices, Half-hour radio piece, BBC Radio 3 2002 Response Time, Public sound installation, Metro Hall Square, Toronto for New Adventures in Sound Art 2000 Grasping and Clinging, Collaborative installation w Denise Hawrysio, Project 304, Bangkok, Thailand

Group Exhibitions 2010 Newspeak, Saatchi Gallery, London Anspayaxw, ‘Border Zones: New Art across Cultures’, The Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver 2009 Faster Higher Stronger, ‘Sound Proof 2’, independent art space, London 2008 Response Time II, ‘Parallax’, Fieldgate Gallery, London Someone Else and ITU, Collaborative installations w Tim Wainwright, Deep Wireless Festival, Gallery 1313, Toronto 2007 Push comes to Shove, Collaborative installation w Denise Hawrysio, ‘Analogue & Digital’, Fieldgate Gallery, London and ‘Transcentric’, Lethaby Gallery, London Hearing Loss, ‘Signal and Noise’, VIVO, Vancouver Feeding the Habit of Energy, Podcast soundwalk, RADAR, Loughborough University ITU, Collaborative video w Tim Wainwright, ‘The Performance of Sound’, TATE Britain, Also shown at The Old Operating Theatre Museum, London and ‘The Art of Immersive Soundscapes’, Regina, Canada 2005 Sound CAD, E:vent, London Do(n’t), Text/sound interventions on the BBC Big Screen, Humber Mouth Literary Festival, Hull 2004 Hmm, ‘Noises’, Open Arts Platform, London Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen. 2yk Galerie, Berlin

Motion-triggered plastic carrier bags, Great Hall, Goldsmiths College Medicine Box, Soundtrack for film by David Leister, Rotterdam International Film Festival 2003 Auditory Alarm Study 6.03, Wapping Hydraulic Power Plant 2002 Horisontista Horisonttiin, ‘Runaway Spatial Plan Project’, Helsinki, Finland 2001 Cry Wolf, ‘Transience’, Kiasma, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland

Awards and Grants Arts and Humanities Research Council – grant for research residency at Beaconsfield Canada Council for the Arts – various production and travel grants Arts Council England – research and production grants for Transplant project University of the Arts London – various research grants Third Coast International Audio Festival – Silver Award 2005, Bronze Award 2009 British Composer Award 2010 for Sonic Art Selected bibliography Adrian Searle, ‘A ragbag of good, bad and indifferent’, The Guardian, 7 June 2010 Brian Sewell, ‘Is this me or is this good?’, The Evening Standard, 3 June 2010 Charles Darwent, ‘It’s out with the new and in with the oldspeak’, The Independent on Sunday, 6 June 2010 John Kieffer, ‘Artists of the new wave’, The Independent, 11 May 2010 Joél Pauli, ‘Newspeak: British Art Now’, Taxi Art magazine, Issue 1, 2010 Clive Bell, review, The Wire magazine, June 2009

Solo Exhibitions 2011 Plan of the Present Work , IMT Gallery, London 2010 Reassuring Synthesis Small Space Gallery,Berlin 2009 10 x 10 x 10, Gooden Gallery, London, (part of 24Seven curated by Neil Drabble) 2007 Empty Voluminous 1,000,000 mph Gallery, London Interference, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada 2005 From Margin to Centre, A Delicate Matter, ESA Arts, Leeds Pinpoint , Text And Work Gallery, Arts Institute at Bournemouth 2004 Kits , Satchel Gallery, Toronto, Canada 2002 Diaphanous , Skol Centre Des Arts Actuels, Montreal, Canada Cloud Filling , Art System, Toronto, Canada 2001 Eight Hours , Zavitz Gallery, Guelph, Canada

Group Exhibitions 2010 Mark Selby and Kate Terry, Schwartz Gallery, London 2006 More and Less , with Michelle Allard, Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada

Selected Group Exhibitions 2011 Common Logic, IMT Gallery, London 2010 Here and Again, Patrick Heide Gallery, London Miniscule, Oblong Gallery, London 2009 Shadow Boxing, Home House, London 2008 Soot From The Funnel, Lokaal 01, Holland, Curated by Frederik Vergaert and Richard Ducker Heart of Glass, Shoreditch Town Hall, London, Concrete & Glass Festival, curated by Flora Fairbairn A life of Their Own, Lismore Castle, curated by Richard Cork Paraliax , Fieldgate Gallery, London curated by Richard Ducker

Selected Bibliography 2008 Kearns, Hollie, “A Life of their own”, Circa magazine, Ireland August 2008 2008 Thorne, Sam, “A Life of their own”, Frieze magazine online, July 2008 “In Praise of Suffragette City”, The Guardian, July 2nd, 2008 2008 “A Tale of Two Castles”, exhibition news, Art World magazine, Issue 5, June/July 2008 Cork, Richard, “Top Forms”, Royal Academy of Arts magazine, No.99, Summer 2008 O’Sullivan, Mark, “The Shape of Things to Come”, Irish Examiner, April 30th 2008 Cork, Richard, “Expect The Unexpected”, Financial Times, April 26/27th 2007 Schmidt, Gunnar, “Ästhetik des Fadens: Zur Medialisierung eines Materials in der 2007 Geldard, Rebecca, “Kate Terry: Exhibition of the Week”, Time Out magazine, August 8-14, 74

2007 Peck, Robin & Pilipczuk, Sophie, “Monstra” Espace Sculpture, Number 79. Spring 2007 2007 Pilipczuk, Sophie, “A Material World”, Visual Arts News, Volume 28, No.3, Winter 2007 2006 Uhlyarik, Georgiana, “From the invisible to the spectacular”, exhibition catalogue, Mercer Union, Toronto, 2005 Bethune-Leamen, Katie, “Kate Terry: Pinpoint”, exhibition catalogue, The Arts Institute at Bournemouth 2004 Firth-Eagland, Alissa & Chhangur, Emelie, “Sorry for the Inconvenience”, exhibition catalogue, Toronto 2003 Beaudet, Pascale, “Evanescence and Geometry”, Diaphanous catalogue, Skol Centre des Arts Actuels, Montreal

Awards and Grants 2000-2002 Commonwealth Scholarship 2002 Du Maurier Arts Council Grant 2002 Canadian Federation of Graduate Women Artists Award

Collections National Gallery of Canada: 2003, 2002, Private Collections

Yoonjin Jung Lives and works in London

Littlewhitehead Craig Little and Blake Whitehead live and work in Glasgow

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2011 Bad News, Marine Contemporary, Los Angeles Sumarria Lunn, The London Art Fair, London 2010 Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art , Sunderland The Gilt Hole Complex, Arcan Mellor, London 2009 Black Smoke, Machine Gun Club, Royal Standard, Liverpool The Fourth Wall, Bloc, Sheffield Playing Dog , Gimpel Fils, London So Many Fellows Find Themselves, K Gallery, Milan So This is Romance, Bunhouse Bandits, London 2008 Nothing Ever Happens Here, Studio Warehouse, Glasgow

Selected Group Exhibitions 2011 If these walls could talk, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles If these walls could talk , Marine, Los Angeles Modern British Sculpture, Gimpel Fils, London Smokefall , Tintype, London Art First Bologna with Gimpel Fils, Bologna 2010 Prop, Departure Gallery, London Exteriority, Sumarria Lunn, London Figure Study, Gimpel Fils, London Space Made Live, Arthouse, Glasgow A Ticket For A Ticket, Trolley Books, London (performance) Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London Downstairs Review Part II, Gimpel Fils, London Arco Madrid (with Gimpel Fils) Madrid 2009 Newspeak: British Art Now, The Hermitage, St Petersburg Tales That Witness Madness , Elevator Gallery, London Alternative States , Gimpel Fils, London nine days, seventeen hours, thirty two minutes, six seconds, Eleven Howland Ltd, London Grey Matter, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh Wild is the Wind, Wall, London 2008 Bloomberg New Contemporaries , A Foundation, London Conjunction 08 , Stoke-on-Trent Bloomberg New Contemporaries , A Foundation, Liverpool

Jez Tozer / The Alchemy Series: Negrado / artist book published by ‘the Alchemy Series / 2010 No Oil Paintings / The Guardian / October 2010 Vision Magazine / China / August 2010 Issue Interviews-Artists Volume II / written by Nick James / Published by CV Publications / October 2010 Newspeak: British Art Now / Published by Booth-Clibborn Editions / May 2010 a-n magazine / March 2010 / (cover image) Brickface Press Issue 4 / July 2009 / (cover image and interview) Grey Matter / June 2009 / Edinburgh University Press (Catalogue) Art Monthly / November 08, No. 321, (cover image and pp 28-29) Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008 / New Contemporaries (1988) Ltd (Catalogue) Liverpool Biennial 2008 / The Guide / Liverpool University Press A Bulletin Issue 3 / A Foundation

2010 MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, London, U.K 2008 MFA, Ewha Womans Univ., Seoul, South Korea 2007 BFA, Ewha Womans Univ., Seoul, South Korea (Magna Cum Laude)

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2010 Art Mos h, A Foundation, London, U.K Art in Woodstock, Methodist Church, Oxford, U.K Quick, Before We Come to Our Senses (London Art Award), 3 Bedfordbury Gallery, London, U.K 100 Artists for Pride, Twilight Gallery, Brighton, U.K No espere más (Wait no more) , Here Today Gone Tomorrow Pop-up Gallery, London, U.K Degree show, Slade School of Fine Art, London, U.K Flower, Imperial College Healthcare Charity Arts Committee, Charing Cross Hospital, London, U.K Foire Internationale Dessins du 21e siècle (International Drawing Fair 2010), Loft Marquardt, Paris, France Sasapari (Korean Contemporary Artists), Oxo Tower Barge House, London, U.K Face Me and You, Space Hall and Corner, Seoul, South Korea 2009 Research Images as Art, Art Images as Research, North Cloisters, London, U.K Interim Show, Woburn Place, London, U.K Poznan Academy Residency, Skoki, Poland Anger Management , Alsop Space, London, U.K. 2007 Chae-Yun-Jeon , Gallery La Mer, Seoul, South Korea 2006 Young Artists , LG Art Center, Seoul, South Korea Wish, Post Theatre, Seoul, South Korea Dreaming Enthusiast , Fringe Festival, Seoul, South Korea 2003 Hands of Healing , EMAF, Seoul, South Korea

Awards 2010 London Art Award, London, U.K (Finalist) E-Media Art Festival, Seoul, South Korea (Finalist)

Selected Publications 100 / Francesca Gavin / Published by Laurence King / April 2011 (forthcoming) Ali Sheikholeslami / Burn Hitler’s book to ashes, make a bible / Euronews / January 2011 Vernisage Tv / London Art Fair / January 2011 Ben Austin / London Art Fair Review / Published online at FAD / January 2011 Herbert Wright / London Art Fair 2011 Review / Published online at FAD / Janurary 2011 London Art Fair Highlight : littlewhitehead @ summaria lunn / interview with Keld / published online at FAD / January 2011 Georgina Adam / The Art Market: Asian Joust / Financial Times / January 2011 76

Catalogue To add subsequent pages to this catalogue simply turn the three binding bolts anti-clockwise, remove the back cover, place the new pages on top of this section and replace the back cover then turn the bolts clockwise until finger tight.