JEWELSH: 2021

12/3/21

DECEMBER 2021

After a month of inactivity on this blog it is time to reactivate. Maybe because the world seems to be closing in again and Covid is reinventing itself from season to season.

Reading is one of the things that I have used most time on in 2021. I keep finding more books and new authors who are oriented to themes to which I return continually. Things that feed into whatever I am (trying to) work with myself.

Craig Wells: Emergent Ears

Emergent Ears is a little book published as part of Craig Wells' Phd submission at the Dept. Art, Design and Music at the University of Bergen. The book was accompanied by a double LP of new music released under the artist name Vonrik Haug (Three other albums are released online through Apple Music). The album and book were launched at the opening of his excellent exhibition at Lydgalleriet, Bergen - an immersive, multi channel installation with sound that combined field recordings and digital synthesis. Craig joins the growing cohort of sound-writers whose work makes an essential contribution to sound studies and the expanding field of sound art. Craig and Lydgalleriet are also publishers of a small series of booklets in the Blue Rinse series, related to a concert programme of the same name. Two of these feature texts by artists I have been collaborating with in 2021, Tijs Ham and Magdalena Manderlova, and others in the series are by Alexander Rishaug, Andrea Parkins, Francisvo Lopez and Craig Wells himself. Well worth checking these out, contact Lydgalleriet to get them!

Blue Rinse publications: Tijs Ham and Magdalena Manderlova

Among others whose books I have recently enojoyed are Kate Zambreno, Moyra Davey and Terju Cole, all of whom address themes that chime with my artistic and academic interests. Drifts by Zambreno and Index Cards by Davey both return repeatedly to questions around photography, memory and writing and often cite Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, WG Sebald, Chantal Ackerman, Chris Marker and Rainer Maria Rilke. Teju Cole's new essay collection Black Paper is a timely publication, combining analysis of today's global social-political situations with a deeper historical gaze, including a text on Carravaggio which is one of the finest pieces of art historical writing I have encountered.

Photographer/filmmaker Moyra Davey and novelist Kate Zambreno address similar themes

In one of his essays in Black Paper, Cole discusses painting in a way that I find engaging and insightful.

The following quote would quite well describe my own relationship to (contemporary) painting and seems to me to be a description of the practice of my colleague Jon Arne Mogstad, a painter with a deep knowledge of tradition and the will to reinvent continuously.

" I am drawn to painters who are in a proper present tense, painters who have a well-calibrated relationship with what painting has been, who manifest what painting is, and allow for what painting could come to be. Such artists are convincingly contemporary, their practices and gestures confirming their inheritance of the lineage. As custodians of the history of painting, they know their place in it. They are twice timely: just in time and right on time."

Elsewehere in the same text, Cole discusses a work of Julie Mehretu, another artist whose work I have admired since first seeing it in a group show at the Drawing Centre in New York in the late nineties. Her works were for me a highlight of Documenta 13 in 2021 - though I felt they were challenged by unsympathetic hanging in Kassel.

Jon Arne Mogstad's studio in November 2021, with works in progress.

Julie Mehretu's painting Conjured Parts (tongues) discussed by Teju Cole in Black Paper

Detail of Julie Mehretu's work at Documenta 13

Aside from reading, making notes and sketches and updating documentation of recent projects, photographing the changing weather conditions in the environs of home and studio seems to be an appropriate way of spending time these days.... Winter has arrived in Bergen with sometimes spectacular results.

The sad news of the last days has been the death of Alvin Lucier, a composer whose work has such profound significance not only for avant garde music but for much of contemporary culture. Lucier was one of the references discussed in "Reiterate, rerun, repeat", the exposition I co-authored with Michael Francis Duch for the March 2021 edition of Vis, Nordic Journal for Artistic Research.

I will be sitting in this room for most of the winter.

10/4/21

Final night in Surnadal

One last walk along the fjord to watch the sunset before leaving Surnadal and returning to Bergen tomorrow. I have been here for five weeks as curator for Billag Festival 2021 and it has been an exciting but also quite exhausting time. There is a full overview of the whole festival programme from April to October on the Surnadal Billag website: https://www.surnadalbillag.com/billag-festival-2021

9/24/21

The Atmospherics 11 at Høstutstillingen

The Atmospherics 11 (remake / remodel) is currently showing in Høstutstilling (The Autumn Exhibition) at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo. This version of The Atmospherics is for single screen and stereo sound, in contrast to the many multi channel versions that have been exhibited since 2014. The piece was initially made for online presentation through BEK, Bergen center for electronic arts, and this presentation in Oslo is the first offline exhibition. The film is composed of elements used in earlier iterations of the project, and is closest to the version shown at Entrée, Bergen, in 2018. Images and editing by Jeremy Welsh, sound by Trond Lossius.

8/19/21

Billag Festival September 2021

The festival at Surnadal Billag continues through September, with a mixed programme of exhibitions, workshops, concerts, performances and film screenings, both at Surnadal Billag and Surnadal Kulturhus (cinema and gallery)

First out is a workshop / audio visual project "Pixels / Frames / Beats / Drones" which was originally scheduled to happen in Surnadal, Trondheim and Bergen in 2020, but was cancelled due to Covid 19. The original plan was to hold a workshop at Surnadal Billag, a concert & performance in Trondheim as part of the MetaMorf biennale of art and technology, and then a performance at the artistic research conference in Bergen. This year's version is more compact: a three day workshop followed by two days of presentations in Surnadal.

Updated information on each event and exhibition will be posted on the festival's Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/billagfest

7/16/21

Take Me To The River part 2

Saturday 17th. July we open the second instalment of Take Me To The River with paintings by Jon Arne Mogstad and video by Jeremy Welsh. The exhibition takes place at Kallastuå, Surnadal, as part of Billagfestival 2021, a programme of exhibitions and events arranged throughout the summer by Surnadal Billag.

News article on the exhibition in Tidens Krav (in Norwegian)

https://www.tk.no/stiller-ut-i-kallastua-ta-meg-til-elva-del-2/s/5-51-1011501

6/14/21

TMTR-2

Take me to The River (part 2), an exhibition by Jon Arne Mogstad and Jeremy Welsh, to be shown at Kallastuå, Surnadal, in July 2021 as part of Billagfestival 2021. This is a continuation of a project shown as Molde Jazz Festival Exhibition in 2020 at Møre og Romsdal Kunstsenter. The exhibition will comprise a series of new paintings by Jon Arne Mogstad and video installation by Jeremy Welsh.

Images below from test projections for a two-projector HD installation. Tests made at Surnadal Billag, 10 June, documented with mobile phone.

5/3/21

Billag Festival 2021

The first exhibition in the series Billag Festival 2021 at Surnadal Billag took place the weekend of 23 - 25 April, with works by Kwestan Jamal Bawan and Carl Martin Hansen. The exhibition featured paintings and drawings by Bawan and sculptures and paintings by Hansen. During the opening on Friday 23 April, and again on Saturday 24th. percussionist Asle Hansen performed in the exhibition.

The festival runs until early October with a varied programme of exhibitions, concerts, performances and screenings.

See more details at Surnadal Billag.

4/22/21

Surnadal

In Surnadal again, seven months after the last time. Same house, different room. Same view, different angle. Getting ready for the opening of the first exhibition in Billag Festival 2021, a six month programme of events at art centre Surnadal Billag. I am one of two guest curators for the festival. This is a new phase in my prolonged entanglement with the place. Previously I have organised workshops and events, run courses here with students, helped to recruit artists to the residency programme. So it is a kind of home from home. Each time I return between now and the end of September there will be a different group of artists, a different focus, another set of expectations and challenges. Having ended my teaching career almost a year ago, having been, like everyone, a virtual prisoner of Corona for the past year, it is good to have this project.

18 September 2020

22 April 2021

4/20/21

Updates

Digital print from series ABOT (a box of time) 2021

The whole site has recently been significantly updated. Inactive links have been repaired and more documentation material has been added. The Photo Gallery page has been updated with a selection from a new ongoing image and text project (so far without title) which will be further developed during 2021. The digital print above is from the series ABOT (a box of time) made between December 2020 - March 2021, consisting of 52 prints based on collages. The series forms part of a larger project that will incorporate multi screen audio visual installations and performances later in 2021.

Also online now, Reiterate, Rerun, Repeat, an exposition in VIS, the Nordic journal of artistic research, by Michael Francis Duch and myself. The exposition consists of an email conversation illustrated by excerpts from some of our joint projects, including the ongoing audio visual work "Accumulator". See videos for Accumulator 1 / Accumulator 3 / Accumulator 4

4/19/21

Reiterate, rerun, repeat

Reiterate, rerun, repeat is an exposition by Michael Francis Duch and Jeremy Welsh, published in edition 7 of the Nordic Artistic Research Journal VIS. (Norwegian/Swedish and English.

Accumulator, performed at Dokkhuset, Trondheim, January 2019.

ABOT (a box of time)

ABOT (a box of time) is an ongoing project started in late 2020. The first phase of the project, which will later be developed into installations and audio visual performances, consists of a series of 52 digital prints, based on collages. As prints, the images are produced in Super A3 format on archival matte paper. In digital format they can be presented as a slide show and incorporated into video projections.

Some of the images in the series are considered to be visual scores that can be interpreted through sound, and as audio visual events. Those featured here are intended as stand-alone images, either in print form, on screens, or projected.

Collage has been a format that is suited to the reduced circumstances of working under COVID restrictions. Converting the collages to digital format increases the potential for distribution and exhibition through a variety of channels, online and offline. It is planned to exhibit them as prints in connection with a video and sound installation, when possibilities to do so become accessible again.

The full set of images can be seen here

3/19/21

Continuing Covid Conundrum....

As we move into the second year of the pandemic and the third wave in Norway it becomes more urgent to think of ways to make sense of continuing to produce art under the circumstances. Where will it go? Who will see it? Does it even matter any more? As opportunities for large scale art works in public venues are scarce, other strategies are necessary. Online distribution for example, but how effective or satisfactory is that really? I remember the days of net.art in the mid nineties. A revolution of sorts, then just like the dot.com boom, it was over.

Norway had engaged with notions of online art at a national level. I was one of a number of artists who received commissions to make net-based art projects, accessible through a national portal. At some point the server got switched off. These projects might just as well never have existed.

Most artists, of necessity, have some kind of personal web site or blog. But how often does anyone look at these - including this one? We are constantly bombarded with links to innumerable sources of information, every day we click our way through page after page, but apart from certain things, like the front page of a newspaper we regularly read, how often do we actually return to a page or a site we have previously visited?

Adding new information or updating becomes more an act of archiving, and less one of publishing. But in a time of limited options it is at least something that can be done. Perhaps in the future, post pandemic, there will be a massive campaign to get our art offline and out into the world, in physical spaces, to be approached by the physical bodies of a public. I'd like to see our cities and towns after Covid as huge "salon" exhibitions - uncurated, democratic, just a celebration of what artists have managed to do despite the circumstances!

In the meantime, some screenshots from an ongoing photo enterprise that could be in print, but for now exists only digitally. Walking, observing and documenting is something that can be done, with minimal resources. Some of the images are shared online in Facebook groups including Edgelands and similar. Sharing in that way is at least a form of visual communication within a quite tolerant milieu.