Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth awarded Expo Emerging Artist Commission
Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth follow their recent Frieze Project for the Frieze Art Fair 2009 with a commission for the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival. The new work, Staged, produced by Collective Gallery, will be installed in a central Edinburgh venue. This multi-channel video installation will combine live CCTV with pre-recorded footage and will function as a digital camera obscura which will transform the Edinburgh Festival into a mise-en-scène and the visitors, tourists and locals into players. Staged will be open to the public from 30 July to 15 August 2010.
“Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth are two of the rising stars of Scottish visual arts,” says Joanne Brown, Director of the Edinburgh Art Festival. “We are delighted to be able to support the creation of this new artwork for the 2010 EAF which builds on the work the artists have been developing over the last five years.”
“Edinburgh, especially during the Festival, is an iconic and theatrical city raising questions of what is real and what is fictional,” says Kate Gray, Director of Collective. “People come to see performances and at the same time form part of a human drama. In ‘Staged’ they will become part of a production that navigates the real and fictional.”
Many of Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth’s videos and performances involve visual simile or metaphor through the abstraction of everyday objects and actions. Fundamental elements of light and dark are prevalent and this new work will draw on the original use of the planned venue, using the devices of mirroring, repetition and reflection to capture the complex relationship the city has with performance, heightening viewers’ awareness of the staging of the Edinburgh Festival
Set in overlooked and underground spaces while the festival takes precedence in the city, the video footage in Staged will be like a kaleidoscope which obscures and abstracts well-known vistas, playing with what is real and unreal/ natural or artificial. The work will go someway to capturing the complex relationship the city has with performance, heightening the viewers’ awareness of the staging of the Edinburgh Festival by mixing the premeditated with the spontaneous; the organized with the randomized; what’s intended to be scrutinised with what is not; what’s appreciated with what is taken for granted.
Videos projected within the work will blur the boundaries between the abstract and the representational. The funfair of the festival will be viewed as if through a Claude glass, abstracting and transfiguring the intricate carnival within it, with human adventurous playful qualities.
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