Commemorative Glass features a selection of new and recent works from artist Nick Crowe. Crowe’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including film & video, sculpture and the internet. This exhibition focuses on Crowe’s specific interest in glass as a contemporary artistic material. Ranging from large scale sculptures to delicate hand-engraved panels, the work utilises the diverse material properties of glass together with its varied cultural connotations to explore issues relating to how we remember, from personal expressions of loss, to momentous political and historical events such as The Gulf War.
Crowe questions the prevailing perceptions held within British Society, looking particularly at the way media representations of events are never simply unbiased reflections of reality. Commemorative Glass also continues Crowe’s investigation into the role of technology and its contingent effects on everyday life. The internet is used both as a focus for his work and a tool to research its content. Taking the dematerialised and often ephemeral material found online, Crowe transforms it into solid, but transparent, sculptural forms.
Commemorative Glass includes two new large scale sculptures produced specially for Cornerhouse, The Beheaded and The Campaign for Rural England.
- The Beheaded is a memorial to all the people who have been beheaded in the first five years of this century. Crowe researched the internet extensively to find media reports of people who died in this brutal fashion throughout the world. The 68 named cases he found, a fraction of the actual victims of such practice, are represented by an equal number of headless glass figures hanging together in a mobile made of high tech materials from the space industry.
- The Campaign for Rural England places a life size replica of the bus shelters found in towns and cities throughout the UK into the gallery. In this version, the plastic and metal elements are replaced by English Oak and the laminated glass has been smashed to form a beautiful mosaic. The work provides a comment on vandalism within the city, and plays with the cultural opposition between “rural idyllic landscapes” and the ostensible chaos of the urban environment.
exhibition supported by:
exhibition launch drink sponsor:
If you have enjoyed our exhibition Commemorative Glass you may be interested in some of these publications, available from the Gallery Bookshop:
Nick Crowe: Commemorative Glass – Available from January 2007!
Cornerhouse, retail price £18.95 – Special exhibition price £15
This exciting new catalogue has been published to accompany the Commemorative Glass exhibition. Edited by Kathy Rae Huffman and including texts by Godehard Janzing and Marcus Verhagen, the book features all the works in the Commemorative Glass exhibition, together with commentary of Nick Crowe’s work. Essential for anyone who has enjoyed this exhibition.
Join us in the Gallery Bookshop to celebrate the launch of this new catalogue on Thursday 18 January at 7pm.
Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications
Nick Crowe:: The Reporters of the BBC Website
The Green Box, £20
This beautifully-presented new book by Nick Crowe is a further exploration of mechanisms of information transfer in the Internet. Thumbnail portraits of BBC journalists, taken from the BBC’s website have been enlarged by 600%, reducing their colour range so that the pictures look pixilated, giving the impression of a digital source in the book itself, even once transferred to print.
Join us to celebrate the launch of this new book on Saturday 2 December at 3.30 pm.
Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson
Manchester Art Gallery, £9.95
This catalogue accompanied the first major exhibition of Crowe and Rawlinson’s collaborative work. Many new pieces were made for this exhibition, executed in a variety of media including photography, sculpture, film, found objects, sound and text works.
Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications
Internet Art
Tate, £14.99
Julian Stallabrass explores Internet art today, tracing its movement to a position of prominence in the art world, bringing along with it revivals of modernism and the avant-garde. Suggesting that whilst material art often feels disengaged with the world, internet art is humorous, socially aware and politically active, this is a fascinating analysis of online art and its sometimes hostile relations with more conventional art practice. Stallabrass also argues that this new art may have radical implications for the ways in which we conceive of art’s authorship and ownership, and how we draw the borders between what is art and what is not.
Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Modern Age
Routledge, £24.99
This book by Sadie Plant, Director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University is the first major study of the Situationist International. Tracing the history, ideas and influences of this radical and inspiring movement from dada to postmodernism, Plant argues that situationist ideas of art, revolution, everyday life and the spectacle continue to inform a variety of the most urgent political events, cultural movements and theoretical debates of our times.
Like these? You may also be interested in the following titles available from the Gallery Bookshop…
New Media Art: Practice and Context in the UK 1994-2004
Arts Council England, £15.00
Complex, fast moving and constantly evolving, new media art can often be difficult to grasp. Echoing its long-standing institutional support for and recognition of new media practice, this Arts Council England publication is an ideal introduction to this diverse and innovative field. Edited by Lucy Kimbell, it brings together theoretical and historical comment with examples of recent artists’ projects funded by Arts Council England, providing a context for new media arts practice in the UK since 1994.
Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications
Internet Art
Thames & Hudson World of Art Series, £8.95
Described as ‘superlative’ by Art Monthly, this useful and informative book is the perfect guide to internet art today, including over 200 illustrations, as well as a timeline and glossary. Edited by Rachel Greene, a curatorial fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, this is an engaging exploration of the exciting and radical ways in which contemporary artists have embraced the internet and redefined the conventions of art.
The Cornerhouse Gallery Bookshop also stocks a number of other titles in the Thames & Hudson World of Art Series including Art Since 1960, New Media in Art and The Photograph as Contemporary Art, all priced £8.95
At the Edge of Art
Thames & Hudson, £19.95
An impressive survey of digital and internet art… an indispensable guide to digital art in the last decade, coming from a new, different perspective – State of Art
This comprehensive survey of digital art and internet art today covers fields as diverse as computer programming, web-cam based performance art, computer games, internet art and ‘digital lifeforms’. Written by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito who co-direct the new media programme at the University of Maine, the book proposes that those working with the internet and digital forms are ‘electronic visionaries’ redefining art for the 21st century.
New Media Art: Basic Art Series
Taschen, £6.99
‘New Media art’ is a generic term often used to describe art which is related to or created with a technology invented or made widely available since the end of the 20th century. Covering genres such as net art, software art, artist-made video games, locative media projects, interactive narratives and multimedia installations and performances, this compact book provides a wide-ranging overview of New Media art as a specific art historical movement, focusing not only on technologies and forms but also on thematic content and conceptual strategies. This is an essential introduction for anyone with an interest in New Media art.
The Gallery Bookshop also stocks other titles from Taschen’s Basic Art series including Video Art and Conceptual Art. Each book includes a detailed introduction, a timeline of the most important events that took place during the time period, images of the most important works together with interpretation of these works.
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry
Reaktion Books, £25
This fascinating study explores the connections between chemistry and art from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth. Offering intriguing new insights into the place of the material object and the significance of the natural, the organic and the inorganic in Western aesthetic, Esther Leslie considers how advances in chemical engineering provided visual artists with new colours, surfaces, coatings and textures, dramatically changing the way artists aopproached their work. Making reference to everyone from Goethe to Hegel, Blake to the Bauhaus, Synthetic Worlds is a revealing investigation of the affinities between chemistry and aesthetics in general