Best Practice Seminar: with Alex Pearl
29th May 12.00PM-4.00PM @ AirSpace Gallery
www.newgenerationspace.wordpress.com
airspacegallery
no4 Broad Street
Hanley
Stoke-on-Trent
Staffordshire
ST1 4HL
In this session we will be looking at the fundamentals of what it means to be an artist and will explore ways of moving an artistic practice forward. The main speaker will be Alex Pearl an artist whose practice we feel presents an example of best practice, through his development both of his work and relationships with galleries and curators. Alex has also gained recognition and experience through taking part in commissions, and residencies, both in this country and abroad.
UK artist Alex Pearl sets up situations, which illustrate our predicament. He makes mini-epic films, video installations, games, photographs, sculpture, blogs and books. Throughout his work there is a sense of an acceptance of failure or disappointment as important parts of the human condition. His new work for The Whitstable Biennale is based on a mistake. Last year, when he began to consider making work for the Biennale, a friend commented to him: “Whitstable? That’s where Dracula landed”. The mistake was soon rectified, but when he discovered Peter Cushing lived in Whitstable, he decided to write a sort of vampire novel entitled The Pearl Fisher. Based on Bram Stoker’s diary form, but without the benefit of plot or supernatural threat, his novel (in the form of a blog) soon became what the artist calls “an aimless ramble through forests of coincidence and disappointment.” The narrative of the blog is the only thing loosely connecting the films to be presented in Whitstable. Firstly, a set of three ghostly apparitions born of obsessive watching of Hammer horror films and an interest in Victorian theatrical magic. Next a series of informal blue films made at the beach and finally a film of a male bingo caller, calling to the ladies of Whitstable’s Oxford Bingo Club.
