HMK (HotelMariaKapel) presents:
LANSKIP
¨language under construction¨

a project by:
Rebecca Birch & Charles Danby

Rebecca Birch and Charles Danby explore the structural transformation of language through the vernacular of landscape, taking opposing approaches of collection and manufacture. Rebecca Birch re-edits an extensive archive of collected video and sound material presenting location as a document in continual flux, while Charles Danby constructs a series of large-scale sculptural interventions that explore a collective and shared sense of landscape.  Working in residence at Hotel MariaKapel the artists adopt a philosophy of free exchange, each allowing the other access to their material.  Starting from two desks that face each other the artists construct a series of modular partition walls to mark a third shared space. Here the artists present a series of collaborative works.

For Rebecca Birch Lanskip at Hotel MariaKapel marks a departure point from an intensive period of research and production encompassing projects in the UK, Canada and the US.  These video-based projects have been rooted within an exploration of the landscape, exposing the difficulties in expressing in words the temporal experience of physical locations.  At HMK Rebecca reconfigures this mass of video material, tracing new narratives across the range of material, from conversations with inhabitants of the vast arctic tundra to the residents of a tightly controlled country estate in the UK.  Across an architectural structure of audio playback, projections and online streaming Rebecca presents a series of new configurations of video material.  During the course of Lanskip the public are invited to contribute to this new fluid archive via conversations both in the gallery and through skype to lanskiptalk.  Charles Danby locates the landscape as that which is inherently removed from narrative content. Detached of representation his works, drawings and constructed objects, occupy temporal sites that entertain contrivances of landmass, of architectural structure and entropic geometry. They draw on internal configurations of marks made, that densely layered become fractured pictorial frames that explore the way in which meaning is constructed. Adopting material objecthood and conceptual drift the works testify to the emergence of language from a fabric of existing signs and images.

ELEMENT ONE

Element One (22 March – 8 April) is the first outcome of this collaboration, and focuses on the landscape and its general architectures. These are presented not as literal representations but as signatories of a new language built from basic component parts, material, text, geometry and colour. Light and shadow are central to Element One with natural daylight cast through HMK animating strong shadows and streaks of light, placing the work under a state of constant change. In a collaboration process that parallels the development of interactive online interfaces, Rebecca Birch and Charles Danby propose a re-structuring of language through the co-mergence of essentially oppositional positions, playfully locating new potentials for a subject. 

Rebecca Birch, 1978 (based in London, UK) (Goldsmiths 2001, Slade 2007) is an artist working in video, conversation and performance.  Recent research and exhibitions include Great Northern, a journey to the Arctic Circle (2008), Invention (2), City Gallery Offsite, Leicester (2008), On Time, Courtauld Institute, London (2008), 36 Day Mountain, solo exhibition at Galeria Aneks, Poznan (2007) and a residency at the Banff Centre, Canada (2007)

Charles Danby, 1976 (based in London, UK) (Slade 2002) is an artist and writer and lectures at Loughborough University, UK. Recent exhibitions include If You Build It They Will Come (2008), G39, Cardiff, Pyramids (2008) Galeria Del Cortile, Rome and Despite My Intentions (2006), Loft, Dublin. He is a co-founder of PROJECKT, an international curatorial and publishing body. Forthcoming exhibitions include Secondary Pyramids, The Academy of Arts Gallery, Tirana, Albania (2009)