The impending tsunami of the digital download

The impending tsunami of the digital download

Record label Flying Nun is explored visually along with other independent music labels in New Zealand in the next exhibition at Adam Art Gallery.

Opening this August, Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction explores the material and visual legacy of independent music production and distribution in New Zealand.

Five New Zealand artist/musicians have been invited to create new works that ask vital questions about the forms music has taken.

“In the era of the digital download, the exhibition looks at the relationship between the evolution of music and the way it is delivered,” says Assistant Curator Laura Preston.

“It also considers how the music industry will respond to future forms of dissemination and what implications these will have for those who are involved in its production.”

Object Lessons developed from investigating the history of the record label Flying Nun, and the media and fan interest directed at the label’s recent resurgence. The other ‘urban myth’ that has informed the exhibition was the day in 1987 when the only vinyl record press in New Zealand ceased production and was dumped in Wellington harbour, forcing the production of vinyl LPs offshore.

“Although the site of vinyl production is now so distant, the ability to digitally download music has changed the face of music production and many independent artists and musicians continue to support the physical music formats for aesthetic, economic and social purposes.

This exhibition project will be presented alongside the work of London based art collective and Turner Prize 2010 nominees The Otolith Group. Exclusive to the Adam Art Gallery, their trilogy of film works A Long Time Between Suns also examines the histories of futurity and the artistic treatment of moving image and sound to give another take on the making of the ‘record’.

Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction
Fitts & Holderness, DJ $1 Record (aka Bryce Galloway), Caroline Johnston, Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins, Ronnie van Hout.
Accompanying book project featuring Campbell Kneale, Antony Milton and Bruce Russell.
Curated by Laura Preston & Mark Williams

The Otolith Group: A Long Time Between Suns
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
7 August – 10 October 2010

Opening: Friday 6 August 2010, 6pm

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Fitts & Holderness is a collaborative duo formed in 2001 currently working between Glasgow and Sydney. Since completing their Fine Art degrees in Painting at the University of Canterbury, Fitts & Holderness have been making immersive fictions and investigating unsolved disappearances. They have exhibited in independent spaces across New Zealand. Key exhibitions include Holloway Road: The Alleged Visitation by L.M. at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in 2009; The Watchman of Okains Bay, a one day installation at The Physics Room in 2007; and Snoop which was part of a group exhibition titled Sleepwalker at Artspace in 2005. Projects are often extended outside gallery spaces and their modes of production vary across projects. Fitts & Holderness produce video footage, photography, audio, objects and documents. Their work has also included making publications such as the inaugural issue of Psychedomus, a psychology journal. Public notices about their fictions and texts have also been featured in newspaper articles. Recently, variations of the Holloway Road project were shown (or ‘featured’) in Australia’s Runway magazine (Issue 15: Lies, I Trusted You) and in the exhibition project Reasonable Force at Rm103 in Auckland in May 2010.

Emma Fitts is based in the UK and gained a Masters of Fine Art from The Glasgow School of Art in 2010. Julia Holderness is based in Australia and works in communications and art development.

Bryce Galloway was born in Hamilton. He moved to Auckland in 1987 to study at Elam School of Fine Arts graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992, later graduating with a Masters in Fine Arts in 2005. At Elam Galloway collaborated with fellow Intermedia student Daniel Powell, resulting in the group Wendyhouse. The group were very active in the early to mid 1990s. With Powell now resident in Germany, the group’s activities have become sporadic. Wendyhouse are known for playing satirical punk pop songs, often employing toy musical instruments and lo-fi production methods. In 2002 Galloway began teaching art and design courses at Massey University Wellington, where he now lecturers, writes and coordinates many of the drawing papers. Also in 2002, Galloway launched the first of his fanzine Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People. The fanzine is still produced quarterly and is now in its 37th issue. The fanzine has a largely autobiographical bent, with Galloway mining the awkward and embarrassing aspects of the everyday into a written narrative and cartoon drawings. An anthology of Galloway's zine is to be published by Clouds later this year. Galloway is also the co-organiser of Wellington Zinefest. Recent exhibitions include: Rock Drawing 101 (a poke in the eye with a burnt stick), Campus A Low Hum, New Zealand, 2010; Same Same (Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People), Blue Oyster Project Space, Dunedin, 2010; Soundtracks: Music for Film, Site Gallery, Sheffield, United Kingdom, 2009; Daddy Doo, New Zealand Film Archive, Auckland, 2008, Wellington, 2007; Mumbling Through to the Chorus, Engine Room Gallery, Wellington, 2007.

Caroline Johnston was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She studied at the Massey School of Fine Arts, graduating with a BFA in 2005. She then went on to teach at Massey and has continued to maintain her artistic practice. Although object-based, her practice is largely conceptually driven and she utilises many different media (drawing, painting, sculpture, video, sound, ready-mades and performance). Her work is largely concerned with the music-oriented sub-cultures and communities which she has spent her adult life involved with. As a non-musician, her work is both a celebration and a critique of the values and iconography of music culture. Johnston has exhibited in artist run spaces and one-off group shows outside the gallery system in New Zealand and the USA, for example the group show concurrent with the music festival Campus A Low Hum, Flock House, Bulls, 2010; Territorial Pissings: A Show About Kurt Cobain, The Engine Room, Wellington, 2007; Lucky Sod, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, 2006 and How To Be A Friend, Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery, Wellington, 2005. She is represented in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Europe.

Torben Tilly was born in Wellington, New Zealand. In 1993 he moved to Australia to attend Sydney College of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 1995. Though his practice is predominantly sound and music-based, it also traverses the fields of video, performance, object-making and installation. His work has focused on aspects of visual and auditory perception in relation to time, place and memory. Tilly has performed and exhibited extensively throughout Northern Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia, and has also produced sound designs for film and audio installations. He first started playing music in 1991 as the drummer in Wellington’s psychedelic folk rock group The Garbage & The Flowers. In 1997 he formed the collaborative music project Minit with Australian sound-artist Jasmine Guffond. Other recent collaborative projects include working with Swedish/Irish artist Robin Watkins; FFM (with Bek Coogan, Steve Heather, Andy Wright); and Bad Statistics (with Justin Barr, Jo Contag, Jeff Henderson, Mark Williams). Some notable exhibitions/performances include: FFM: I Am A Strange Loop, Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, 2010; Menschheit, Mothers Tankstation, Dublin, 2008; FFM, Schiller Theater, Berlin, 2008; Tomorrow, Again, Artspace, Sydney, 2007; High-Tide: New Currents In Art From Australia & New Zealand, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius and Zacheta National Art Gallery, Warsaw, 2006; and Variable Resistance, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2003. Selected musical publications include: Still Life With Black Light, (FFM LP, Edition Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, 2009); Static (Bad Statistics LP, K-raa-k, 2007); Eponymous, (Organ Eye CD/LP, Staubgold, 2007); and Now Right Here, (Minit CD/LP, Staubgold, 2004)

Robin Watkins was born in Stockholm, Sweden. While mainly working collaboratively with Nina Canell in various formats, Watkins is also an active sound collector and musician. He has released many full-length albums and has performed sporadically in a number of constellations during the past decade. Most recently Watkins published The Luminiferous Aether, which is the first in a series of sound editions on Wiens Verlag, Berlin. Recent projects include: Nevertheless, Faith is in the Air, Moderna Museet Stockholm, 2010; Aion Experiments, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2010; Performative Attitudes, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2010; Cologne Contemporaries, Projects in Art & Theory, Cologne, 2009; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, MuHKA, Antwerp, 2009; and Calling Out of Context, ICA, London, 2009.

Ronnie van Hout was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. He attended the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University between 1980 and 1982, where he majored in film. In 1999 in received a Masters of Fine Arts from RMIT University, Melbourne. In the late 1980s van Hout formed the ‘space metal’ band Into the Void (with Jason Greig, Mark Whyte, Dave Imlay and Paul Sutherland). Into the Void has released two self-titled albums, on Flying Nun in 1993 and Avoid Music in 2006. Since 1981 Ronnie has exhibited regularly in New Zealand and Australia, and his work has featured in solo and group shows in the USA, Netherlands, Austria and Germany. In 2003 his work was the subject of a major survey show, I've Abandoned Me, an initiative of Dunedin Public Art Gallery and curated by Justin Paton. The show toured throughout 2003 and 2004 to the Auckland Public Art Gallery, Auckland; City Gallery, Wellington; and Te Manawa, Palmerston North. Van Hout works with a wide variety of media including sculpture, video, painting, photography, embroidery and sound recordings. He has been artist in residence at the ELBA Art Foundation in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 1994; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Taranaki Polytechnic, New Plymouth, 1996; International Studio Program at PS1, New York City, 1999; Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, 2004-2005; and undertook the Antarctic Arts Fellowship in 2007. In 2004 he was a finalist in the Walters Prize Art Award and was awarded a Laureate by the New Zealand Arts Foundation in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include: Uncured, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2010; Who Goes There, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, 2009; BED/SIT, Artspace Sydney, 20o8; A Loss, Again, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, 2008. Recent group exhibitions include: Unnerved: The New Zealand Project, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, 2010;Fully Booked, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne, 2010; Too Much of Me -7 Paths Through the Absurd (with Detour), Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2009; Lost and Found: An Archaeology of the Present, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2008. He currently resides in Melbourne, Australia and is represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; Uplands Gallery, Melbourne; Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland; and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington.

Antony Milton has been making music records, exhibiting sound installations and performing live under various nom de plumes (including A.M, The Nether Dawn, Paintings of Windows, Mrtyu) since the early 1990s. A recurring theme in Milton's work is an investigation of 'place' and 'presence' and the ways in which these function within the representational realm of recorded sound. Using predominantly analogue sources (tape loops, field recordings, amplified resonant objects, voice and guitar) Milton's works have a high degree of intimacy and commonly range from the gestural and nuanced through to the visceral and ecstatic. Milton is also the curator of the renowned PseudoArcana record label.

Campbell Kneale has dominated the bedroom-loner home-recording scene for the last 15 years with homespun sun-drenched drone project, Birchville Cat Motel, longhaul sleepmetallers Black Boned Angel, and most recently the rural psychedelic clutter-noise of Our Love Will Destroy The World. He has toured incessantly with these bands and ran two record labels Celebrate PSI Phenomenon and Battlecruiser releasing well over 300 releases in cassette, lathe cut vinyl, CDR and compact disc before winding the labels up in response to the state of contemporary music. Although still responsible for a daunting musical output, Campbell Kneale has returned to painting as his primary means of addressing the world.

Mark Williams is Exhibitions Manager at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington. As an independent curator his research is focused on the fields of artists’ film, video and music. He is also a practicing musician exploring the fields of rock and improvisation, previously releasing albums in New Zealand, the United States and Europe. Mark Williams uses D'addario strings.

ENDS

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