JUNEAU PROJECTS, Preview 6PM-8PM, Friday 9th April 2010

JUNEAU PROJECTS

Preview: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, Friday 9th April 2010
SATELLITE
61 Thornton Street
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 4AW
United Kingdom
10:30 AM – 6:00 PM, Monday to Saturday

SATELLITE is proud to present
JUNEAU PROJECTS

Juneau Projects’ practice has taken an interesting and obstinate path recently. Recent works include electrified instruments hosting hand-carved effigies of wild native animals. These instruments are played in live performances into sound-reactive plug in software that they have developed to respond visually to music via midi input. This work is all an extension of their enquiry into the evolving interfaces between humanity, and nature.

Renowned earlier works were based upon purposeful action, echoing the abrasive cycle of nature and humanity’s exchange in the modern age. Their auto-destructive performances (and video documentation of these) demonstrate this duality; for example the destruction of recording equipment in My Wretched Heart Is Still Aglow. In this piece destruction and creation take place simultaneously, as the microphone, an object with limitless potential for creative expulsion, is dipped into a bonfire while hooked up to an amp. The work thereafter exists now as a video and sound recording of the act itself. These works deal with two desires: to immerse oneself in the revelation of technology and to push its limitations, or to address issues of its insatiable re-evaluation and production.

In these performances their major influence, Christian Marclay and in particular his work Guitar Drag, is clear. In their most recent works, Juneau Projects have now expanded these ideas: taking revelation in the ability of artists such as Marclay and his predecessors to influence music and also to allow music to influence and change art history. Considering Futurist Rossolo and subsequent Dada and Surrealist artists – their use of often non-musical apparatus and focus upon experimentation, improvisation, collaboration and invention sets the pitch to Juneau Projects’ new sound-reactive plug in patches presented at Satellite.

This screen-based work combines the duo’s record label/music venture Juneau Records with created historical heraldry featuring emblematic images of nature. The images they employ are often found crests from history employed as a device to evoke a sense of forgotten community. These images in one patch appear in low-fi Adobe Illustrator drawings and jump between different stages of a wood engraving. Throughout the piece the sound to which the visuals are responding seems to distort and dissolve the imagery into an incoherent and erratic animation.

This demise is either an example of causal cancellation or a fiendishly reflective gesture. Accurate and relevant as we browse search engines for eco issues from a device on perpetual charge. Juneau Projects are self-confessed city-dwellers. Alongside the majority of the population, they finding nature’s cycle an aggressively real and yet a foreign and incomprehensive concept.

Responding to man’s insatiable appetite to emulate nature and simultaneous inability to comprehend nature on its own terms. Their work demonstrates the chaos of the modern world that facilitates contradictory terms of existence: creation and death or surplus and starvation. The commonplace emulation of a highly specialist skill like wood-carving, or using the icon of nature for its own purpose to create a sense of authenticity, usually to commercial ends simultaneously highlights a new democracy and questions the idea of value.

In conjunction with this exhibition at Satellite, Juneau Projects will perform live at Satellite’s one-night Warehouse event: First Taste The Lemon…
Including works by artists Johanna Billing (Kavi Gupta, Chicago+Berlin) Kit Craig and Caroline Achaintre (Arcade, London) and Juneau Projects, live music by Gold Panda, Dam Mantle, Seams, Totem Recall and Morgellons.
Warehouse Event
Thursday 15th April, 8PM, Hoults Yard, Walker Road, Newcastle.
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SATELLITE is an independent 4 x 3 meter white cube project space for contemporary art situated at Alt Vinyl Record Store in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
www.satellitesatellite.org

To celebrate the opening of JUNEAU PROJECTS refreshments will be served on the preview evening.
It will also present a special opportunity to browse the Alt Vinyl record collection out of hours, which specialises in rare, deleted and beautiful records, cds, cassettes and all sonic formats.
www.altvinyl.com