Scene 49
ART MATTERS
ALL THAT JAZZ
) This month I’m going to be concentrating on a gallery space within a gallery space, which is challenging the concept of what an exhibition could and should be. The artists allowed to create a world in an intimate room without control or involvement by the gallery which is hosting their activities.
REVIEWS
BY ENZO MARRA
Gallery DODO (https://gallerydodo.com) is a temporary exhibition space situated off the south stairway in Phoenix Art Space, Brighton. It is artist-led and run on a voluntary basis, and is open to the public by appointment through Eventbrite, Instagram @aproposdodo or by emailing dodoinformation@yahoo.com. The current programme of monthly exhibitions has invited two or three artists who share similar concerns or methods of working, to collaborate on producing an exhibition together. The intention is to allow them to initiate a dialogue as individual yet comparably connected artists, for them to explore relationships between their practices. Curating a show which presents this journey, via the cast of works that hang, sit and lean, physically present for those who visit and take them in. The previous shows have included works by Lucy Brown and Sarah Pager in It’s What’s Inside, whose individual practices share a sculptural approach grounded in the body, and a playfulness with structural form and its supports. For their exhibition they worked collaboratively on a series of sculptures which they used as a departing point to explore the idea of a space within a space. Never Seen and Yet Believed In was an exhibition devised between Hastings-based artist Scott Robertson and the London duo Sid and Jim. The show explored our faith in art and its objects by presenting the audience with a number of relevantly conspicuous absences. James William Murray and Garth Gratrix explored concepts of queer materiality through contrasting aesthetic approaches, in Object Q/The Pursuit of Happiness. Motion Sickness is an art collective based in Cambridge and Leipzig, Germany. Formed in 2018, the collective is made up of Denise Kehoe, Eleanor Breeze and Arabella Hilfiker. They presented a show which explored the concept of the technological utopia we live in, while being nostalgic and yearning for the simplicity of pure connection. They have exhibited internationally, including shows in London, Tokyo, Leipzig, Tallinn and Dublin. As a collective, they have exhibited at the Archive and the Contested Landscape exhibition as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas and have had a solo show Motion Sickness at STOCK Gallery, Manchester. Together they run Motion Sickness Project Space, a contemporary arts space in Cambridge. They have also already shown or are set to show Hermione Allsopp, Poppy Whatmore, Joseph Cartwright, Ty Locke, Daniella Pink, Bill Leslie, Lucy Delano, Guy Bigland, Ally Mcginn, Louise Bristow, Andee Collard, Camila Caneque, Lisa Scantlebury, Annie Carpenter, Gabriella Gilmore, Jon Carritt and Dan Palmer. If you looking for something to challenge or inspire you, I am sure some time at this gallery will be the perfect experience which you will remember and take home with you.
BY SIMON ADAMS
) SHIRLEY HORN At The Gaslight Square 1961 (American Jazz Classics). American singer and pianist Shirley Horn only had one speed: dead slow. Never once did she pick up pace to even a gentle stroll. On this double-headed CD, she appears first with a trio in an unknown club in the Gaslight Square entertainment district of St Louis, Missouri. Edging gently through a set of standards, her small voice is always evocative, the accompaniment so minimal as to disappear from time to time. The second CD contains the big band album Loads of Love, recorded in New York in 1962 with the 12-man Jimmy Jones Orchestra plus strings. In truth, Horn does not need a big band to support her and sounds a little lost and more than uncomfortable at the faster speeds required. But three standout trio tracks from 1959 with raffish violinist Stuff Smith ending the set more than make up for that. ) SATOKO FUJII Piano Music (Libra Records). Japanese pianist and composer Satoko Fujii is quoted as saying that she “wants to make music no one has heard before”. Well, she has certainly succeeded with this solo ‘piano’ record. I say ‘piano’ with raised fingers, because the one you thing you never hear is the sound of notes and chords emerging from within. Instead, using short, pre-recorded snippets of prepared piano music – an elbow on the high strings, a rubbing of the lower strings with a felt mallet, a dropping of chopsticks on the piano strings – she edited them all together to create a patchwork quilt of varied, fascinating sounds. The two extended pieces here evolve so organically that you cannot tell that they’re stitched together from such small, random fragments, but they do have a surprising structural coherence. This a long way from piano jazz as we know it, but it is a sonic adventure worth going on for the experience. ) ANDREW CYRILLE QUARTET The News (ECM). And more interesting music, this time from American free drummer Andrew Cyrille. By free, I mean a drummer more concerned with individual expression and feeling rather than merely keeping time, a main participant, not merely a backrow metronome. Here he is supported by wondrous Americana guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street and pianist David Virelles in a set of improvised pieces that are often quiet and always surprising: on the title track you can hear the whisper of brushes on a newspaper spread over the drumheads, while elsewhere he engages in hushed snare rolls, offbeat accents, and odd little taps of sound. Frisell supplies three tuneful pieces in which his chiming guitar notes ring out delightfully, Virelles one intriguingly catchy number, while Cyrille remains an 81-year-old marvel. Most enjoyable.
