Ben Rivers Ben Rivers’ films are at once aesthetic and anthropological projects. Rivers is intent on witnessing the lives of others and presenting them not as oddities, but precious anomalies to be appreciated. His previous subjects have included an elderly man living in a ramshackle cottage in the wilderness of the Scottish highlands and feral children playing amongst the debris of a farmyard. In short, his preoccupation is with those living beyond mainstream, urban culture, in rural if not totally isolated environments. Whereas previous locations have been remote, Sack Barrow explores a small family run factory in the outskirts of London. It was set up in 1931 to provide
Karen Russo work for limbless and disabled exservicemen and, following many years of struggle to maintain a viable business specialising in metal electroplating for the engineering industry, the factory finally went into liquidation in 2011. In June that year Rivers filmed the environment and daily routines of the final month of the six workers, and has since filmed the empty factory once it had finally closed down. Ben Rivers won the Baloise Art Prize, with Sack Barrow, in 2011.
Sack Barrow, 2011 16mm film, colour with audio, running time: 21 minutes Part funded by The Changing Room, Stirling and Hayward Gallery, London.
Meditations on a Triangle, 2010 HD video, 14 min, and three art objects by Mark Titchner, Shezad Dalwood and Jeremy Millar Gift of the artist and Outset Contemporary Art Fund 2011.
George Shaw “The Next Big Thing forms part of what has become a series of paintings of landmarks no longer there. The pile of rubble is all that remains of a pub called ‘The Hawthorn Tree’. The pub itself appears in a painting of mine from 1999 called ‘The Hawthorn Tree’, and also as a ruin in a painting called ‘The Age of Bullshit’ in 2010. The pub sat in the Tile Hill Estate, and I went there frequently with my dad. Neither the pub nor my dad are here anymore. The land is now a housing estate of it’s own.”
The Next Big Thing, 2010 Humbrol enamel on board, 147.5 x 198 x 5cm
Meditations on a Triangle 2010, is comprised of a video and a three art objects. It explores the application of Remote Viewing (RV) the psychic ability to see and describe remote geographical locations, or ‘targets’ to the exploration of outer space. The video work centres around an attempt by a Remote Viewer to psychically access an undisclosed target using only a set coordinates as a reference. During the Viewing, the Remote Viewer’s impressions were documented and then delivered to three artists: Mark Titchner, Shezad Dawood and Jeremy Millar, whose different practices address questions of religion and spirituality, para-psychology and mysticism and their relation to ideas of modernism. Russo asked these artists to create new works based on the visual descriptions provided or respond to the process. In their responses, each artist freely projects its own preoccupations and interests.