07 Dec 2008

The Intertwining Line at Cornerhouse

Artists:
Catherine Bertola, Rachel Goodyear, Margaret Harrison, Melanie Jackson, Naomi Kashiwagi, Ulrike Lienbacher, Guto Nobrega, Dan Perjovschi, Sissu Tarka

Screenings:
Tricky Women 2008, VSUP 2002 – 2007

In the Café:
Marjane Satrapi

The Intertwining Line presents early and contemporary animation and its intertwined relationship with artist's drawings, highlighting the relationship between these two disciplines.

The exhibition features work by nine artists, including internationally acclaimed artists Dan Perjovschi and Margaret Harrison alongside a new generation of British artists, such as Melanie Jackson, Rachel Goodyear and Naomi Kashiwagi. Their work will be accompanied by screenings of Czech animations and films selected from Tricky Women Festival.

As the subtitle suggests, much of the work in the exhibition can be considered in some way subversive. Whilst animation is often considered as childlike entertainment, the radical potential of the medium has a long history - whether this is the implicit social criticism that is hidden within early Czech animation, or the use of humour to create powerful social commentary in modern artists' animations. Drawing also has this potential and this can be through meticulously crafted images that merely hint at social unease or speedily drawn sketches which carry a powerful charge of immediacy to create political statements.

The concept of the uncanny in everyday life is a theme connecting many of the artists in the exhibition. Manchester-based Rachel Goodyear's delicately executed drawings present disjointed narratives, in which the familiar becomes menacing. Austrian artist Ulrike Lienbacher's drawings of young women going about intimate, everyday actions such as washing, share with Goodyear's work a sense of the 'uncanny.' Another Manchester based artist Naomi Kashiwagi's explores the relationship between music, language and drawing processes. In a new work created for this exhibition, Kashiwagi utilises a gramophone as a drawing tool, presenting the resulting drawing only, without revealing the tool used to create it. Music is also integral to Guto Nobrega's video Happiness, where time-lapse movies of plants and drawings are projected onto the body of a female performer.

Catherine Bertola uses dust in her practice to produce haunting and evocatively beautiful installations, with patterns from wallpapers, or carpets transferred meticulously into this material. During a residency at Cornerhouse she has created a new installation in a disused store cupboard in Gallery 2 and in the Gallery itself, using dust collected over a period of weeks from around the building.

Other artists in the show take a more overt stance in their socio-political criticism. Dan Perjovschi's sparsely delineated cartoons of stick men, carry a charge of political humour. Melanie Jackson uses drawing as a kind of analytical reportage in her installation Made in China. A double-sided screen displays two distinct, yet related, global stories: concerning young immigrant Chinese women to the UK, one live-action, and one animated. And Sissu Tarka uses digital animation to transform images of iconic public figures including Richard Branson, and Chairman Mao to comment on issues of capitalism and globalisation.

A satirical streak is also present in the work of Margaret Harrison, who appropriated images from comic books, advertising and pornography in her early work. For instance in one of her best known works Captain America, she reworks Myron's classic comic book hero as an Amazonian heroine, complete with stockings and stiletto heels. Her work is presented in Gallery 3, alongside screenings from Tricky Women and student films from VSTUP (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague). Also screening in this gallery are films by Rob Bailey, an emerging Manchester-based artist, whose work features as part of Cornerhouse Projects.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a series of animation screenings in Cornerhouse's cinemas featuring the new release Waltz with Bashir from Ari Folman, and also modern classic Persepolis.

For further details please visit:

www.cornerhouse.org/theintertwiningline