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Indepth Arts News:
"The White Station: Axel Antas, Helen Chadwick, Simon Faithfull, Andy Goldsworthy, Heidi Morstang, Seifollah Samadian"
2004-12-05 until 2005-02-06
Pump House Gallery
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
Snow provokes responses reaching far back to childhood. Historically many
painted and photographic works have documented the epic beauty and
wilderness of the land under snow; Sisley, Turner, and Ansel Adams to name a
few. The White Station brings together works in which artists have
experimented with snow as a physical material, for it's potential to shape
and engage us in its physicality.
Photographs by Andy Goldsworthy document 'Midsummer Snowballs', an
incongruous siting of large snowballs placed in the City of London. Helen
Chadwick's notorious 'Piss Flowers' were formed by imprints taken of
patterns made by the artist and her husband urinating into the snow. These
images document the making of the work and include a poem by Chadwick.
In 'Snowangels' Axel Antas draws from childhood memories of a children's
game in his native country Finland. A person lies down in an area of
snow-covered ground, slides arms through the snow and creates a print of his
action. The imprints fade giving place for a new one to be made. Heidi
Morstang's recent film 'A Doll's House' presents snow immersed forest
landscapes, one fading into the next. Influenced by Ibsen's play of the same
name, the stillness of the visuals is broken by the somehow painful sound of
skis slicing through the snow at speed and references the encountering of
psychological boundaries. Filming during an unprecedented snowstorm in
Tehran, Seifollah Samadian documents a woman, in full black chador,
struggling in the storm under a black umbrella while waiting for a bus to a
soundtrack of cawing birds, whistling wind and snow muffled city sounds.
During an arts-based research trip to Antarctica, artist Simon Faithfull
will produce a new photographic work for the Pump House Gallery that will be
shown as part of The White Station in January 2005. He will also be sending
daily palm pilot drawings to the ICA via email, charting his incredible
journey.
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