Ruth Buchanan
Several Attentions – Lying Freely Part III
2 December 2009 – 16 January 2010
Preview: 1 December 2009, 7-9pm
The Showroom
63 Penfold Street
London NW8 8PQ
UK
+44 (0)20 7724 4300
info [at] theshowroom.org
Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12-6pm
The Showroom will be closed from 24 December 2009, reopening on 6 January 2010
The Showroom presents Several Attentions – Lying Freely Part III, New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan’s first solo show in the UK. The third part of a larger project, Buchanan continues her enquiry into the work of three well-known literary women with a new 16mm film made in the British Library in London. The film is shown in a choreographed installation including 35mm projections, photographs, text, prints and sound, which together question how one speaks as an artist today, and what space this voice creates.
Throughout Lying Freely, Buchanan has constructed ‘meetings’ between herself and the practices of the authors, Agatha Christie, Janet Frame and Virginia Woolf. Using their text or an event from their lives as a point of departure, Buchanan explores the idea of what it means to have an artistic life in public – the tensions between private need and public expectation, and individual desires and collectively received legacies.
For Several Attentions – Lying Freely Part III, Buchanan takes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as her subject. In Woolf’s essay, ‘the character’ sets out for the British Museum in the ‘pursuit of truth’ and compiles an unnerving collection of quotations and thoughts after making a catalogue search under ‘Woman and Poverty’. Buchanan spent a summer sourcing the books that she cites (now housed at the British Library) and a 16mm film titled Several Attentions, which is central to the installation at The Showroom, shows the artist, seen from the back working with a microfilm comprised of these references. She distorts and manipulates the material, shifting the way in which it is perceived; flipping and turning it upside down, moving from a detail to an overview, reorganising and obscuring it with her own body. These processes of obscuring, reversing and movement become present in the installation as Buchanan instigates physical relations that recalibrate relationships with the space of history, and the many voices and positions that create an artistic practice.
Ruth Buchanan (NZ 1980, Te Ati Awa/Taranaki) completed her MA (Fine Art) at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2007 and is currently a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Buchanan has shown her work in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and actively initiates and contributes to printbased projects.
Lying Freely is co-produced by The Showroom, Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, and the Jan van Eyck Academie. It was made possible with support from the Jan van Eyck Academie, Creative New Zealand, and from the Cooperation Measures Grant as part of the European Union’s Culture 2007 programme. Several Attentions has had further support from Creative New Zealand, Kodak and The British Library.
The exhibition at The Showroom is generously sponsored by The Elephant Trust, Outset and Montana Wines. The Showroom is supported by Arts Council England and members of the gallery’s Supporters Scheme.
Events:
Angles, Straight Lines and Curves and the Interference They Cause One Another
Saturday 5 December 2009, 3pm
Ruth Buchanan in conversation with Binna Choi, Frederique Bergholtz, Emily Pethick and Marina Vishmidt
Scattering as a Behaviour Towards Risk
Saturday 9 January 2010, 3pm
An afternoon of discussion, performance and film with Ruth Buchanan
For more information please visit: www.theshowroom.org, or contact Natasha Tebbs:
natasha@theshowroom.org
The Showroom
63 Penfold Street
London NW8 8PQ
UK
+44 (0)20 7724 4300
info@theshowroom.org
www.theshowroom.org
