NICK CROWE: Commemorative Glass
Cornerhouse is pleased to present a major exhibition of work from Nick
Crowe. Commemorative Glass features a selection of new and recent
works, many of which have never been shown before in the UK. Crowe's
practice encompasses a wide range of media, including film & video,
sculpture and the internet. This exhibition focuses on Crowe's specific
interest in glass as a contemporary artistic material. Crowe utilises
the diverse material properties of glass, together with its varied
cultural connotations (fragile, beautiful, dangerous, mundane,
industrial) often drawing together contradictory ideas in one work. He
uses the traditional method of glass engraving by hand, but also works
with high specification glass created for architectural and scientific
purposes. The resulting works range from large scale sculptures to
delicate hand-engraved panels. Commemorative Glass also continues
Crowe's investigation into the role of technology and its contingent
effects on everyday life. The internet is used both as a focus for his
work and a tool to research its content. Taking the dematerialised and
often ephemeral material found online, Crowe transforms it into solid,
but transparent, sculptural forms.
As the title suggests, the theme of commemoration runs throughout the
exhibition. Part eulogy, part investigative act, the work explores how
we remember by manipulating images both personal and public. Some works
function in the manner of a traditional monument: The Beheaded (2006) is
a memorial to all the people who have been beheaded in the first five
years of this century. Crowe researched the internet extensively to
find media reports of people who died in that brutal fashion throughout
the world since 2000. The 68 cases he found, maybe a fraction of the
actual victims of such practice, are represented by an equal number of
headless glass figures hanging together in a mobile. Each element is
made of high tech material used by the space industry, including
dichroic glass and Kevlar thread.
Other works mark a particular significant moment in time, materialised
as shadows under glass. In Proposal for a World Wide Web (2004), Crowe
hand engraved the first sketch Sir Tim Berners-Lee made to explain how
the World Wide Web would function. The image denotes the origin of our
online culture and its subsequent revolution of the way we communicate
and work.
Crowe also examines how the internet itself can be used as space for
virtual remembrance. Crowe is fascinated by memorial websites, in which
web pages are stored as a tribute to the deceased. Moving, personal
messages are written on these pages often directly addressed to departed
family and friends, as though the internet is capable of reaching the
spirit world. He has engraved simple copies of these pages into glass in
June Becher (2003).
Nick Crowe's work also examines the dichotomy between reality and its
representation in the media and questions the prevailing perceptions
held within British Society.
His new work, The Campaign for Rural England (2006), places a life size
replica of the bus shelters found in towns and cities throughout the UK
into the gallery. In this version, the plastic and metal elements are
replaced by English Oak and the laminated glass has been smashed to form
a beautiful mosaic. With its pale wood and patterned glass the bus
shelter suggests the architecture of a late 20th century church. The
work provides a comment on vandalism within the city, and plays with the
cultural opposition between "rural idyllic landscapes" and the
ostensible chaos of the urban environment. In its apparent claim that to
be anti-urban is to be pro-rural, this work deliberately confuses the
destructive and decorative urges which underpin the rhetoric of 'town'
and 'country'.
The difference between reality and its representation is also a central
theme of Operation Telic (2005 - 2006). Operation Telic is the official
Ministry of Defence name for the occupation of Iraq. For this work,
Crowe rendered military propaganda from the MoD website as a series of
12 glass engravings. These engravings are set into shelves and lit from
below to glow eerily green, suggesting a menacing night vision or some
kind of bio-hazard. Electric wires connecting the lights hang loosely
beneath the shelves bringing to mind terrorist's home made bombs as well
as the lack of preparedness with which the UK engaged in the Iraq war.
The recontextualisation of the original online photographs questions
their sanitised and somewhat ennobled representations of British
soldiers in occupied Iraq.
Nick Crowe in Conversation with Rob Tuffnell, Sat 2 December, 2pm -
3.30pm
STREAMING ARCHIVED AT:
http://streaming.cornerhouse.org/NickCroweInConversation.htm
Tour
Organised by Cornerhouse, the exhibition will tour through 2007 - 2008.
First tour date: CCA Glasgow , 16 February - 31 March 2007.
Catalogue
A 96 page, full colour Catalogue to accompany this exhibition, published
by Cornerhouse and edited by Visual Arts Director Kathy Ray Huffman,
will be launched on Thu 18 Jan 2007, 6pm
Kathy Rae Huffman
Visual Arts Director
Cornerhouse
70 Oxford Street
Manchester M1 5NH
United Kingdom
+44.161.200.1523 (direct)
+44.161.228.7621 (general)
+44.161.200.1506 (fax)
+44.7881.903-933 (mobile)
www.cornerhouse.org
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