- Venue
- Crossley Gallery
- Date
- Monday, June 5, 2023
12:00 AM - Address
- Dean Clough, Halifax HX3 5AX
- Location
- Yorkshire
- Organiser
- Art Lab
Art Lab June 2023
Monday 5 June 2023, 7pm
Crossley Gallery, Dean Clough, Halifax HX3 5AX
Presenting: Henry McPherson & Manchester Penetrated
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/art-lab-june-2023-henry-mcpherson-manchester-penetrated-tickets-644342384417
Henry McPherson
Henry McPherson is a musician and artist working in composition, improvisation, performance, and teaching. His creative portfolio includes sound and music for concert, stage, and broadcast, site-specific pieces and gallery installation, experimental improvisation performance in sound and movement, and collaborative intermedia and hybrid-digital art pieces. His work has been shown internationally across diverse settings – from concert halls to galleries, from bathrooms to dance studios, from parks and warehouses to cafes, virtual halls and radio. His current creative interests lie in the intersections of improvisation performance and ecology, knowledge exchange and collaboration with the more-than-human, integrated sound and movement practices, and illustrated notation. He lives and works in East Lancashire.
https://www.henrymcpherson.org.uk
Manchester Penetrated (soon to reform as ‘AnaLoG ZuNs…We’)
Patrick/ Dr Sebastian Baxter (pronouns: We/Us) are the dual personality creators of queer transgressive avant-garde construct ‘Manchester Penetrated’* that for five years has produced provocative urbanist art across a diverse array of mediums ( experimental film, photography, poetry, performance art, prose, scholarly research, cut-up collage, graffiti).
Our experiential, embodied, public-facing, intertextual, and Dada inspired chance procedure practice draws on the ecology and affective attributes of the stimulated body, everyday objects, and liminal space(s) in the city as unified sensual entities. We create art in and out of the material city with/for/facing spontaneous publics outside the academy, the gallery or other spaces of social privilege to celebrate sensory pleasure and the hidden magical intricacies of the built environment.
As ‘Manchester Penetrated’ we disseminated our work and ideas across a wide variety of spaces and to different types of audiences, from academic conferences to queer art events, interviews for podcasts and legacy media, and have contributed the centrepiece chapter in a forthcoming Routledge published book on Deviant Events and Practices due out in late February (date TBC , editor reference available upon request ).
However, the principal platform for presenting our work has been up until now our stated webpage supplemented by our dedicated social media (Insta: @mcrpenetrated Twitter: @DrSebastianBax1), furthermore the approach has been heavily characterised by an autoethnographic, experiential methodology with frank, explicit and unflinching exploration of challenging themes such as addiction and deviant sexuality using our own body and subjectivity as the chief framing device.
We are in the process of winding down ‘Manchester Penetrated’ and morphing into ‘AnaLogUe ZunS…we’; a project more focused on the dynamics of living with/as dual person(s)ality and how this/these subjectivities ontologically relate to tensions we experience between the sensory experience of and sensual engagement with our (built) environment coupled with our increasing discomfort with the disembodied hegemony of the online world as a route to disseminate art and construct subjectivity. As a consequence, we are soon to disengage completely from the internet/social media and begin to communicate our practice in lived settings reproducing or resonating analogue experiences of how the spectator engaged with art pre-Web 2.0.
This thematic shift alongside this radical break with/from the dominant mode of distribution of content has resulted in a discernible change in style and approach in some facets of the practice, while other pieces appear to be building on the strengths of previous modes. Nonetheless, we are experiencing a pervasive sense of uncertainty as to what this new form of artistic enunciation is doing – what works, what doesn’t, how to negotiate the practicalities of this decision, contradictory feeling of loss and relief to end Manchester Penetrated .
We would appreciate the space to recite, display or screen short examples of video, writing and material art (mixed-media, collage, cut-ups) completed as ‘Manchester Penetrated’ in comparison/contrast to more emergent AnalogZunS iterations to elicit feedback/constructive critique/observations from other practitioners in a supportive art community environment. We are furthermore excited about any potential Halifax expeditions – despite an ongoing adoration of Leeds and a back history with Bradford this would be an entirely fresh Yorkshire concrete canvas for us to consume.
*Content Warning: Please be aware that Manchester Penetrated online content both on webpage and related social media covers some challenging and potentially upsetting themes and often includes explicit imagery, therefore we advise a degree of caution when viewing this material.
https://manchesterpenetrated.wordpress.com/
About Art Lab
Art Lab is a monthly meet-up for artists and art practitioners to discuss their work, concurrent ideas and critical thinking. It’s open to anyone who would like to attend and contribute constructively. Art Lab is for sharing ideas, mutual learning, peer support and networking. The format is presentation(s) by artists / practitioners about their work / ideas / interests: ~30 minute presentations followed by Q&A.
Art Lab welcomes all art practitioners at any stage in their career and operates a safe space policy. Art Lab is coordinated by Halifax based artist/curator/writer Alice Bradshaw.
