Collective Gallery
Press Release
White Knight
Alex Gross & Anna Mields | Emily Wardill
19 February - 3 April 2011
White Knight is a group show which brings together a new commission from Glasgow/Berlin based collaborating artists Alex Gross and Anna Mields and an existing work by Emily Wardill. Alex Gross and Anna Mields have developed a new filmwork Farbenlehre and will create an installation using architectural forms to interrupt the space of the galleries, reflecting on architecture's history and potential for utopian vision while Fulll Firearms Workshops by Emily Wardill shows footage developing the script for a feature film to be finished in December 2011. Supported by The Showroom Gallery, London - the workshops involve actors and non-actors working from a script in development, based around the Sarah Winchester story.
Alex Gross and Anna Mields
Collaborative German artists Anna Mields and Alex Gross were commissioned by Collective to make the video-project Farbenlehre. Farbenlehre is set in a small village in Spain, Catalonia; a strange German 'colony' on a hillside 3 hours south of Barcelona. The village was founded in the early seventies by German art teachers as an architectural experiment.
The film is a portrait of this site on the 'outskirts' of German society and based on old 8mm film footage with similarities to Mields' and Gross' first collaborative film-project Arkenberge. Real places and documentary footage is mixed with fiction and sculptural performance. Central to Farbenlehre is the usage of colour in relation to the site, the white houses of the village are the stage for a narration loosely bound to a performative examination of colour.
Some of the colour-installations Gross and Mields will build will be reminiscent of Johannes Ittens "Expressive Farbenlehre" and the pure modernist approach towards colour. The performances though will evoke the feeling of a dark shamanistic ritual. In Farbenlehre the white houses of the village will function as an empty canvas for our colour-experiments.
The concept for the group show is to challenge the notion of white cube gallery space as an empty canvas by using it as a specific context to act upon rather than context free architecture. Gross and Mields will trans-locate some of the architectural features of the village into the white-cube and use them as stage for an examination of colour. The film Farbenlehre will be shown as well as installations and objects influenced by what they found during filming and a colourful wallpainting will be made directly in the space. Emily Wardill's Fulll Firearms Workshop offers architecture as a frame of conciousness, conflating a physical experience with the emotional dimensions of space.
Biography Alex Gross
Born in Berlin, Germany in 1975.
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
EDUCATION
Diploma in fine Art, Universitaet der Kuenste-Berlin, 2003
Meisterschueler of Prof. T. Cragg, UdK-Berlin, 2004
Master of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art, 2006
Kuenstlerischer Mitarbeiter, Fine Art, TU-Berlin
Biography Anna Mields
Lives and works in Glasgow & Berlin
EDUCATION
Master's of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, 2005-2007
Meisterschueler, UdK, Berlin, Germany, 2005
Diploma Fine Art with special success, Universitaet der Kuenste, 2001-2004
Five-month exchange, school of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA, 2004
Emily Wardill
Fulll Firearms:
Imelda is building a house to accommodate the ghosts of people killed by the firearms manufactured by her father's firearm company. While the house is being built, a number of squatters move into the property and Imelda mis-recognises them as ghosts. Jerome, as with the other squatters becomes kind of a confrontation for Imelda of her own experience.
Imelda (voice-over): Imelda sees a man in a room in a house.
The house is at such a distance that she can see his movement
but he cannot make out expressions.
He leaves the room and enters another that she cannot see.
The light is left on in the room even though it is the middle of the day.
Suddenly, he is outside, walking quickly down a lumpy slope
away from the house.
His feet hit the ground at irregular intervals as he navigates
clods of earth and grass.
He trips into a small run and is at the beach.
The light is almost so bright that there is no colour and the
pebbles glare at the shiny sea.
The sky seems to stretch away in strict clarity.
The man's hands are shaking
And he approaches the sea, bends forwards and places them into
the still water.
When the water settles again, he sees his face reflected back in
its glassy surface
And it is the face of another man.
Excerpt from We are behind by Emily Wardill and Ian White, 2010.
Fulll Firearms Workshops by Emily Wardill shows footage developing the script for a feature film to be finished in December 2011. Supported by The Showroom Gallery, London - the workshops involve actors and non-actors working from a script in development, based around the Sarah Winchester story.
Biography Emily Wardill
Born in England, 1977
Lives and works in London
Senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art.
- - - - Notes to editors - - - - - -
· For more information or images, please contact: Jill Brown on 0131 220 1260 or jillbrown@collectivegallery.net
· Collective is funded by Creative Scotland and City of Edinburgh Council.
· Alex Gross & Anna Mields' film project Farbenlehre received funding from the Goethe-Institut.
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
