Created in Birmingham

The results of an interesting collaborative project, carried out in 2007, are just coming out. The project used the question ‘what does this city really look like?’ as a starting point.

Locations were shared-out between a team of ‘photographers’ (none of them are photographers) according to a grid imposed over the area.  The photographers were free to capture whatever they wanted at their location, but it was the grid that determined the locations in the first place.

You can browse the photos on the Birmingham Photographic Project website and it’s worth a look.

The results of the project are being presented in stages - the website being th first with a (limited-run) hardback book and a public exhibition both not far off official announcement.

Wolverhampton-born graffiti artist Temper has won a national competition to create a sculpture that will be installed at The Cube - the final phase of the Mailbox.

He’s now looking for six people to help bring his vision to life and is touring the Midlands looking for suitable candidates. He’ll be calling at:

• Mander Shopping Centre, Wolverhampton - 8 May
• Paradise Forum, Birmingham - 9 May
• Solihull town centre - 10 May

Or you can nominate yourself or someone else online via the Mailbox’s website.

I first came across Temper via the Headcleaner Sessions mixtapes on his site (especially the K Delight and DJ Noize ones) which still seem to be there. He’s recently been feted by the Sunday supplements, had a design used on a Sprite can and decorated part of Saatchi & Saatchi’s London offices. The owners of The Cube weren’t wrong when they describe him to the Birmingham Post as “one of the country’s most exciting young talents”.

Some of this might not be hugely relevant/interesting to most but hopefully it’ll be useful to someone out there.  Interestingness will be resumed shortly.

Arts & Business Awards

“Nominations are now open for the 30th Arts & Business Awards, designed to celebrate excellence in the field of arts and business partnerships and sponsorships”
Deadline for nominations is 30 May. Further information might be on their website but, frankly, if they want to deliberately hide it away I’m not going to look for it.

Open 08 West Midands

“Open is a biennial collaboration between Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, celebrating the vibrant talent of the art scene in the West Midlands and allowing regional artists the chance to show their work at these prestigious venues.”
The deadline is 28 May 2008. Follow the link for application packs and further details.

Short Cuts Film submissions for ArtsFest

D’log reports that the Short Cuts Film programmers are seeking submissions but warns that the deadline for seeing and agreeing films is tight. I’ve not found any further useful information on this but D’log has the contact details so I’d start there if you’re interested. (Via D’log).

BSCI grant funding suspended

The budgets for Birmingham City Council’s feasibility and creative space grants is now fully committed. If this affects you, or you’d not heard of these grants and are interested then bookmark this page and check back in June. Appreciative nod to Simon Gray.

Changes to Grants for the Arts

From 20 May 2008 several changes to the programme run by Arts Council England will come into effect. Further info on the Arts Council England website. (Via Audiences Central News).

BiNS flagged up a story in the Birmingham Mail the other day entitled “Fury over car art” about Bournville residents’ outrage over a wrecked Mercedes on display outside the Bournville Centre for Visual Arts.

The car references Crash, the novel by JG Ballard, and is part of an exhibition called Zodiac 3000 taking place at the International Project Space, transformed for the duration into the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, “an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction”.

Unofficial Ballard website Ballardian.com has reported on this and they reproduce the exhibition’s press release. They’ve also picked up on the Mail’s article.

It’s a brave move by the IPS. As their exhibition curator, Andrew Hunt, tells the Mail “Ballard is fixated with white, middle-class suburbs, which Bournville is”. A willingness to upset the residents of an area well known for it’s Quaker-derived standards, and all in the name of art, must take some courage.

The exhibition continues until 31 May and the Centre is open Monday to Saturday, 12pm to 5pm (7pm on Wednesday).

The Edge, “Birmingham’s first dedicated live and time-based arts venue”, wants to put the joy back into making art:

Saturday Sesh is not networking, it’s not a series of seminars, it’s just a place for artists to meet, to share ideas and resources and to make things happen.

All of which is highly laudable, so more power to their collective elbow. Anyone interested should feel free to drop in from 3pm on Saturday 3 May and every Saturday after for drinks, nibbles and a chat. Admission is free.

The Edge can be found at 79-81 Cheapside, Digbeth, Birmingham B12 0QH, or roughly where the green arrow is on this map.

Sunday 27 April is the closing day of the Behind Closed Doors exhibition being held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.

Over the past two years the organisers of this show have visited in excess of one hundred private art collections within the Birmingham postal district. Now, almost 40 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints have been brought together to reveal the range and variety of treasures that exist outside the realm of public galleries.

So you can marvel at works by Turner and Picasso, as well as more contemporary artists like Hockney, Rego and Parker, that are usually squirrelled away out of public view.

You never know when the next chance to see these will come around so if you’ve got a spare hour or two this weekend then why not pop down? Admission’s free, if you need any more excuse.

The next Pub Conversations conversation, where an artist and a guest of their choice discuss stuff in a pub, takes place on April 29th in the Lamp Tavern on Barford St. Melanie Carvalho and Ross Birrell are the speakers and there are usually questions from the audience. Free but spaces are limited so email selfservice [at] hotmail.co.uk to book. And while the recording will be podcasted the Lamp is a lovely little pub.

Fused inform of an exhibition by local artist Gail Troth taking place at Three White Walls from April 24th - 3rd June.

Is this truly a participatory Universe?

Who makes up your world view are they the poets, writers, and philosophers who give us visions people gifted with some exceptional ability to sense and express the dream that is any age?

Or… Do you consider that each of us by the nature of our consciousness and the need of that consciousness to integrate its experience is a visionary on at least some small scale?

These little images are rather tantalizing…

Coinciding with her exhibition at Ikon, a stunning new series of works by Ruth Claxton will be shown at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts from 2 April – 6 July. Using postcards of works from the Barber’s permanent collection, Claxton has manipulated the top layer of the cards to raise questions about the nature of representation and our relationship with the object.

Artstalking Ana reports on Wunderkammer which opened on Wednesday at BIAD with a live performance, which I’ll let Ana describe:

David Miller and Edward Wakefield were lying inside perspex cabinets as characters drawn from when they were students at Margaret Street. Ed was lying in state, with audio playing (unfortunately you couldn’t hear this very well with all the noise) and David was writhing ineffectually in his white ribbon bondage.

Photo also by Ana with more in her blog post. The show continues (presumably without the live bodies in cabinets) until the 16th, 10am-5pm, not weekends, in the Foyer of BIAD, Margaret St. There’s then a “critique” on the 16th at 6pm.

The first of Harry Palmer’s £1 art commissions is this video work by Simon Raven: “Edited sound and footage of a performance in which a Tibetan singing bowl is played on the ‘The Universe’ big wheel ride in Nottingham.”

“We are in awe and jubilation!” says Harry, and I’d concur. Wow!

More about the scheme at Eccentric City

The website for the New Generation Arts festival has been launched, complementing their blogs nicely (although, if I might be picky, the link from the site doesn’t take you to the right blogs page - sort it out please). As you’d expect there’s a diary of the events taking place over the fortnight along with a list of participants which gives a great snapshot of activity in the region along with links to their websites and such, shockingly a rare occurrence on sites like this.

There’s also the massive 52 page brochure avaialble to download as a PDF, though I’d probably recommend picking up the printed version if you can.

JamFactory aka Gavin Strange is a brilliant designer from Bristol, but he’s launching his new vinyl toy collection, Droplet, here in Brum which gives me a good excuse to write about him here!

I first discovered JamFactory on Flickr, I think after one of his ‘Free Art Friday‘ pics showed up in Flickr’s interesting pages and have been following him ever since. I had seen the above flyer come through on an RSS feed of my Flickr contacts’ photos, but dismissed it at the time thinking it must be a Bristol-based event. Anyway, serendipity fans, I also happen to be subscribed to a feed of all Twitter ‘tweets’ (posts) that mention Birmingham and while doing a very rapid skim read of that, JamFactory’s name jumped out because he was talking about visiting Birmingham. So I didn’t miss out on him coming to Brum :)

Free Art Friday btw is an excellent idea, hint hint, Brum creatives!

Omneity is an exhibition by three aspiring up and coming local artists, Sophie O’Conner, Natalie Randle and Jenny Mann, “dedicated to vast aspects within nature, varying from intense individual brush strokes made up into delicate flowers, dark forests conveying its depth using an array of media and story expressive landscapes that suggest the ferociousness of nature.”

The private view is April 10th at 6pm and it runs until April 18th at Clare Galleries.

This year’s New Generation Arts festival, run by BCU across the city, is being blogged right on the main website, which is nice to see. Along with general news it’s split into four categories with a dedicated blogger for each one:

Creative Writing (Mike Morrison)
Music (Steve Shaw)
Interactive (Chris Unitt)
Visual Arts (Danny Smith)

Missed this at the Ikon Eastside party last year but it’s in the running for Fierce. Here’s a sample video:

via aboutmyarea B13

Paul Conneally and Nikki Pugh’s Invigilator: Digbeth took place on Saturday.

This is the fifth in the Invigilator series where a single set of directions has been transposed onto different locations to determine the exact place for watching over; we can choose our significant starting points, but then a pre-determined sequence of lefts, rights and straight-ons takes us on a not-quite-random walk to an unplanned invigilation site.

Nikki recorded hers using Twitter from her phone, which was nice to see. I wonder how mobile microblogging could be used for other art-related events…

And photos are slowly going up here.

Nice piece of psychogeography people!

Stuart Whipps is a local independent photographer, who, amongst other things, documented the closing of the Longbridge Rover plant and its subsequent move to China. The exhibition of this work will be at The New Art Gallery Walsall and runs from April 4th to June 1st with the private view on Thursday 3rd April which open to all.

This exhibition brings together photographs of both the Longbridge and Nanjing plants. Though relating to a very specific context, these images speak volumes about the transformation of heavy industry in the 21st century and its wider implications.Taken from flyer

Harry Palmer’s Victorian Gentleman’s Toilet field trip looks to have been well attended judging by photos on Nikki Pugh’s blog.

As well as Harry’s initial report more pictures are promised in the next issue of the Eccentric City but if you come across any evidence online do leave a comment and I’ll post it here.

More stuff, to be added to as it comes my way.

Birmingham Mail covers the event. “Flushed with inspiration” indeed!

Harry has a Flickr stream.

Here’s his website and he has a blog.