Jerwood Visual Arts and Film and Video Umbrella have announced exhibition dates for the forthcoming edition of the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards, along with an overview of each of the pilot works that the four selected artists are developing in response to the curatorial theme, ‘What Will They See of Me?’
Opening on 12 March 2014 at Jerwood Space, London, the exhibition will premiere the works by Lucy Clout, Kate Cooper, Anne Haaning and Marianna Simnett. The artists will consider themes of identity, visibility and posterity, and embrace and interrogate new technology and elements of performance. The exhibition will be co-presented at Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow where it opens on 4 April 2014 as part of Glasgow International.
Bursaries of £4,000 to research and develop new project ideas are awarded to the four shortlisted moving image artists, who must be in the first five years of their practice. During the concurrent exhibitions in Glasgow and London, two of the four artists will be selected to receive a further £20,000 commission, enabling them to develop their initial ideas into finished works, with support from Film and Video Umbrella. The finished works will be exhibited, once again at Jerwood Space and CCA, in 2015.
Background noise and digital ghosts
Lucy Clout, who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture in 2009, will investigate the background noise of modern communication, and those examples of so-called ‘minor speech’ that are everywhere around us but do not always capture our attention.
Kate Cooper is interested in how our everyday performance is produced online and how in turn this might relate to ideas of gender. Her project investigates the potential for self-invention that our relationships to our own images produce. Alongside her practice, Cooper is also co-founder of London-based artist-run initiative Auto Italia South East.
Alluding to the shifting sands of the desert and the backdrop of a mythological historical past, Anne Haaning’s proposed work considers the marks we inadvertently leave in digital space and the records that we choose to make to document personal journeys. Haaning, who is currently undertaking an MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, will experiment with the idea of digital ghosts, whose identity and meaning is forever changing, and who will eventually outnumber and outlive us.
Recent Slade School of Art MA Fine Art Media Graduate Marianna Simnett’s proposal revolves around the image of an udder as a symbol of innocence and abundance. The piece develops into a wider reflection on our desire for pristine, virginal images of nature and our knowledge that these images, like milk itself, are not always inherently ‘natural’.
More information at whatwilltheyseeofme.org.uk
