Blurb / aside

Big train bearing down on me.

Is how it feels to have my first non tidy-paintings-on-walls type solo exhibition coming up in a week and a half.

It's all good though, as they say. The work nears completion and is, for me at least, going to work just fine as an installation.

Below is the promotional image and blurb for the show.



Icarus Crane is a character / project name invented days before the exhibition of his first piece, namely “The Forger Of The String Between The Starry Heavens Above And The Moral Law Within”; an interactive, projection based performance installation.

“Please to enjoy the exhibition as designed execution for the pleasure participation, welcome” continues the research undertaken some months before the first performance of “The Forger Of The String...” into the working of the human mind and how it's functions and malfunctions can be reflected in image, sound and text – with a focus on non linear, durational narrative elements.
This installation of sound, text and drawing concerns itself with the relationship between reality and fantasy in the individual mind, using a combination of language and image drawn from sources ranging from factual texts to automatic drawing and surrealism and touching on subjects from Northern European art history and the biological function of sleep to the worship of dead heroes and romantic obsession.

The spoken word piece to be performed on opening night does contain some prerecorded samples but will almost entirely be read aloud, sampled, looped and processed live, to be replaced with a looped recording for the rest of the exhibition.

An online presentation of interactive, digital drawings designed in anticipation of the exhibition can be found here http://pleasetoenjoytheexhibition.blogspot.com
For more information on this artist, please visit http://aroomforimprovement.com

In fact, I've only just sent this copy to be vetted by the exhibition space's staff, so I may need to come back and edit it. For the moment anyway, this is my story and I'm sticking too it.

Below is a slide show of images from the past few weeks which I've created in the open source paint.net program. Basically, a free (donations welcome) version of photoshop. These are a mix of digital paintings and photo manipulations. Nothing special by the standard of the people who specialise in this sort of medium but fun to do and it's through these kinds of experiments that I've put together the web based portion of the exhibition mentioned above.





Digital painting to me is fairly empty without the added touch of interactivity which, as one sees from the simple flash files displayed at the "Please to enjoy..." page, is a skill I have yet to master. The idea of seperate but connected work exsisting soley online and made entirely from digital media is something I will continue to develop though, as it is a facinating area to work in and is one which is so desperately under used by contemporary artists even now when the internet seems so integral to our daily lives.

I've also been tipping away at the soundy trickery I'm developing to try to complement the narrative elements of The Evolution of Lauren Begaun and will be doing a run through / recording of that next week with a view to a small salon type performance at the end of the month. I think.