Talk and Music Event:
On the occasion of the exhibition Teacher's Pet by Dillwyn Smith
Tuesday, 17th April
Marco Livingstone in conversation with Dillwyn Smith
6:30pm - Drinks
7pm - Talk
Marco Livingstone is an art historian, writer and independent curator who has published widely on contemporary painting, sculpture, drawing, video and photography. His particular interests include Pop Art and the works of such painters as David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones, Paula Rego, Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann, on all of whom he has published substantial monographs and/or curated major retrospectives. He has known Dillwyn and followed his work closely for about thirty years and has written several catalogue essays on his paintings.
Thursday, 19th April
Evening of music with Lucy Railton and Adrian Corker
6:30pm - Drinks and music performance to follow
Continuing the dialogue between Dillwyn Smith and the musicians Adrian Corker and Lucy Railton which began when Dillwyn Smith was invited by Adrian Corker to make the record sleeve and print for the Giancito Scelsi EP release on SN Variations. Lucy Railton played at the launch of the record at Patrick Heide CA in 2015.
Lucy Railton is an internationally renowned cellist and will perform the 1993 works by American composer Alivin Lucier, "Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases".
"One or more large vases are placed around the cellist. Microphones are inserted into the mouth of the vases, routed through amplifiers to loudspeakers. During the course of the performance, the player slowly and continuously sweeps up the range of the cello, searching for resonances in the vases which are picked up by the microphones and made audible for listeners."
Since the mid-1960s, Lucier (*1931) has produced a range of important compositions that have influenced the culture of experimental music and the sonic arts... By concentration on sound as a physical phenomenon, Lucier has deepened the field of experimental music, often through research-oriented stagings dedicated to the act of listening, while at the same time extending new music composition through his unique strategies. Such an approach and sensibility only confirms Lucier as a vital figure within the sounding arts in general. From the compositions of Lucier, we may extract a general theory of sound, one suggestive of hours to inhabit the sonic world as well as to hear the not yet sounded. For his works manifest a studied rapture in relation to sound, highlighting its place between acoustic fact and acousmatic dreaming, between material reality and the elusive polyphonies animating it. Lucier guides us into listening deep, to seeing sound as a vibrant matter of daily life with fiery consequences. - Brandon Labelle.
Musician and composer Adrian Corker will be improvising, in the downstairs space of the gallery, with test oscillator, guitar amps and lock-grooves cut onto acetate, featuring sound material selected by Dillwyn Smith.
Adrian Corker has recently written music for Rowan Joffe's Tin Star and Florian Hoffmeister's The Have-Nots. He also runs SN Variations, a label that has released music by Giancinto Scelsi, John Cage, Laurence Crane and Chris Watson among others, and that features performers including Aisha Orazbayeva, Lucy Railton and Mark Knoop. Corker works in an improvisational duo with Jack Wylie featuring sax and oscillators/electronics and they released their eponymous album in November last year.
www.adriancorker.com
www.snvariations.com
Sunday, 13thMay 12-2pm
Afternoon of music with Shem Jarrold
To mark the closing of the exhibition Teacher’s Pet, Shem Jarrold will be playing the sarangi, a string instrument used in Hindustani classical music. The folk etymology is that sarangi is derived from 'sol rang' (a hundred colours) indicating its adaptability to many styles of vocal music, its flexible tunability, and its ability to produce a large palette of tonal colour and emotional nuance.
Shem Jarrold has played violin since the age of 6, but was also captivated by the north Indian sarangi as a child. After seeing a Rajasthani folk troupe perform in a local theatre, the seed of fascination was sown. The complex and otherworldly sound produced by the instrument was like no other he'd heard, and he couldn't imagine how such a sound could be produced mechanically. Although it was the instrument itself that drew Jarrold into Indian music, the more he learned about the theories and concepts of Indian Classical Music, the more it chimed with him. The melodic and rhythmic concepts instinctively appealed to him, as did the representation of ragas as characters and scenes in a miniature painting tradition called ragamala. When Jarrold moved to London he finally got the chance to take regular lessons, and has been studying the instrument intensively for the last three years.