Crossing Lines: April meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 4th April 2012
Here is the lineup for the April meetup of Crossing Lines:
Simon Head writes: “Some of my recent work explores the idea of a conceptual interface between 3D and 2D. 3D subject and the 2D printed photograph. Photographs of structures taken from both the front and the side - these two perspectives presented as a diptych - relating directly to the conventions of mechanical drawing - photographic information in an isometric composition.”
Judith Jones subject will be derived from her current Ph.D. work: The Urban Village Concept: Using Poundbury, Dorset as a case study for research.
Alex McIlhiney writes: “Following my visit to the gHost seminars I will present some sketchy ideas of who may become the ghosts of tomorrow. This includes promising young footballers and former eastenders actresses. I will also have an update on the Canary Wharf project and my plan to take a psychic around the site to gather their 'impressions'.”
Claire Reddleman writes: “I'm working on some sketches for a series, looking at excising text (and possibly all sorts of deliberate signs) from images of a journey through a street. This is proving more complicated than expected and pushing me to think about how photographing differs from perceiving - in that the way I conceived this idea is proving very difficult to realise; it seems that I notice things around me in a way that is very different to how they can appear in a photograph.”
More too on Claire’s ‘Oppositional High Street 2012’ detour that counters the hegemonic triumphalist narrative of High Street 2012
Michael Rodgers will be presenting his sketchbooks of current M.A work dealing with the study of figures in urban space and imaginative layering over the scene.
Len Salem will be presenting recently published work—‘A Train Journey in Winter’.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: March meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 7th March 2012
Here is the lineup for the March meetup of Crossing Lines:Johannes Rigal writes that he "will elaborate further on completed work around non-sites & places as well as present findings, thoughts & ideas as an extension to his own "working concept". Integrating his own photographic & theoretical work as well as the work of other artists, this will serve as an addition to previous discussions within Crossing Lines as well as an input for further discussions and for consideration for the artists & participants of the CL group."
Nick Scammell will be contrasting W.N. Herbert's fine poem, Breakfrost, with one of his own, which owes its genesis to it. The former proposes the idea of medieval photographs while the latter meditates on carrier bags as contemporary presiding spirits of place.
The work of Michael Frank will also be presented.
Mick writes: 1) I started a project in Milan (my home town) about spirituality and more specific about the habit to adorn lamp-posts, traffic lights and curbs where some mortal traffic accident happened. A specific ‘non-place’ has been transformed in a simulacrum of an altar; a worship place where no gathering let alone spirituality was intended to happen.
2) In London I started a project on empty buildings that are due to be demolished. Stripped from all their meaning within (office/living/retail) do they still have the function they intended to or do they become ‘non-places’? To make a comparison, is a broken umbrella still an umbrella even if it doesn't fulfil the task it was intended to?
3) During a Magnum workshop I started a project on shopping malls and more specifically on how we interact with those spaces. I took a series of pictures in the waiting area which was provided with a couch and other seating solutions. Again it is an investigation on how we perceive ‘non-places’ and how we appropriate them in a certain sense. People gather there just to hang around, in the wintertime to stay dry and warm, in the summer time to stay cold or just to gather up with mates.
Crossing Lines: February meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 1st February 2012
There are two main presentations for this month's meetup.
First, a presentation on the first Crossing Lines Group Project for 2012: Memorial:
Memorial - If one considers non-places in terms of the ignored place, the nothing-place, the vacuum, and then considers memorials as meaningful, significant places, then we have an opposition. It would be a challenge to photograph the meaningful in the city. Memorial is a good word, and of course applies to much more than statues of men on horses.
- Who decides where meaning lies?
- Who decides how it is represented?
- Must memorial be collective and public?
- Can it be private and personal? Is this a source of tension?
- Must memorial be physical? Must it be permanent?
- To what extent must a memorial be a place?
Nick Scammell quotes from Annette Kuhn's 'Remembrance':
"The struggle is now, the past is made in the present.
Memories evoked by a photo do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments. In all this, the image figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary, but not sufficient, to the act of meaning-making; always signalling somewhere else....What happens, then, if we take absences, silences, as evidence?"
The photograph as a type of memorial in and of itself.
Alex Macilniney has begun working with sound and will be showing new images and playing audio field recordings of Canary Wharf as part of his ongoing project on financial districts.
As a complement to Alex's presentation John Levett will introduce recordings from Michelangelo Antonioni: Trilogy And Epilogue a recent project inspired by four of Antonioni's films and including works by Marc Behrens, Olivia Block, Jason Kahn & Steinbruchel.
Crossing Lines: December meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 7th December 2011
These are the confirmed presentations for this session.
David Killeen makes a welcome return to Crossing Lines to present a documentary piece focusing on security booth structures and the individuals who work within what David describes as 'these banal generic structures; bizarre when coupled with their surroundings'.
Carol Kenna will be presenting work from over forty years of engagement with Woolwich. Carol writes: "As a child it was the centre of my universe, an elegant town, a garrison town. My days were punctuated with performances by the Royal Artillery band at the Granada cinema with its Wurlitzer organ that rose and sank out the orchestra pit, afternoon tea in the Co-operative restaurant or Lyons Corner House – the longest, most narrow restaurant in London. I was captivated by the never ending reflections in the concave steel book-ends of Southern Electricity’s display window and journeys on Woolwich Ferry with glimpses of the brass pistons that drove it across the river."
Nick Scammell writes: "If a picture is a silent poem, then a poem is a speaking picture. But when does poem become photo? When to write and when to click? These bare bone poems seek to evoke or suggest photos that could have been taken. In the rush to photograph, perhaps some are best untaken? Or best ‘taken’ by words. I continue to explore the ways in which memory is kept, visually and verbally."
Michael Rodgers will share work by Wim Wenders and Victor Burgin to complement Nick's presentation.
Alex McIlniney's has booked a 'tentative' slot to present field recordings from Canary Wharf which complement the text images of last month's meetup.
John Levett will perform an act of cultural exchange.
Michael & Nick will be briefly taking responses to the 2011-2012 programme distributed at the November meetup.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: November meetup:New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 2nd November 2011
The confirmed presentations for this session are as follows:
Alex McIlniney's work "concerns Canary Wharf and an invented mythology using photomontage and found text." The work is the wider series from which the work in the Crossing Lines Autumn exhibition was taken.
Sabes Sugunasabesan writes: "Using some of the images of the City I am going to share my review of my photography—why I have arrived at photographing London and is it where my photography is at the moment? I hope to develop some tentative answers from feedback from the Group; ideas for future directions, presentation of work in progress, further reading, more focus."
Hugh Look writes: "One of my photography projects ("Moderate America") has been involuntarily relocated from New Jersey to southern Florida. Encountering somewhere new for the first time, even without much time to photograph or reflect on the experience, is always interesting. There was a lot to absorb, and so these few photographs are a collection of random moments but are beginning to hint (to me, at any rate) what I might find in my next visits."
John Levett will present a reflection on the constructed image in the work of Leslie Hewitt.
Michael Rodgers & Nick Scammell have been putting together ideas for themed shows for 2012. These will be trailed during the meeting.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: October meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6-8 pm: Wednesday 5 October 2011
Please note change of room for this year to NAB 3.26
There are three confirmed presentations for this session.
Anita Strasser is going to show her most recent work on people facing potential redundancy. She has recorded what people have to say about what it's like to be in a situation like that, and has photographed them as they were speaking. This work also brings into question the meaning of the workplace. Anita is familiar to us from her work on The Deptford High Street Project but her current work represents new departures.
Christian von Wissel writes: "Archaeology of Error: Working with negatives allows incorporating the possibility of error, that things can go wrong. It forces you to deal – at its best it permits you to play – with the fact that you don’t have total control over the image. I like coming back from a journey and not knowing what I have brought with me. It makes you appraise the time implied in the process of seeing (it can also be horribly frustrating, of course). Things not only can go out of hand, they also always simply go on while images capture but the memory of moments gone by. So how much time lies between a field-trip and its development? Spanish: its ‘revelation’ – in the laboratory? How could this time be put to work as a method?"
John Levett will be presenting reflections from recent work in Hull and the Humber Estuary and questions how much of his work is documentation and how much projected wishful memory. Issues of communality, the pastoral, the cultural conservative, refractory nostalgia and the films of Terence Davies are touched upon.
A reminder: the Crossing Lines Annual opens at Linear House Gallery on 10th October with the PV on Thursday 13 from 6pm onwards.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: August 2011
Crossing Lines: Wednesday 3rd August 2011: New Academic Building: Room 3.14: 6-8pm
There will be a brief moment of self-congratulation for Elephant in a Room at Linear House Gallery which closes this coming Sunday; thence to the following:
Judith Jones will be showcasing a new series entitled Disjointed Symphony. She writes: "I am aiming to visually capture the metropolis that is London-reducing it to a seemingly mythological recreation of structures that appear unreal within a reality."
Amy King will be presenting for the first time. She has been documenting the final days of the Ferrier Estate. Amy writes of the moment "when social housing comes to the end of its life and the defiance of a few (and the conditions they are left to live with). According to the Rat and Mouse website there are apparently 23 homeowners and three tenants left, living amongst derelict tower blocks, sheet metal, filth and darkness."
Krystina Stimakovits will be making a welcome return to CL with recent Havana scapes & the built fabric.
Marco Caterini may also be joining us; a nod to the next CL exhibition in mid-October will be made; a possible CL response to the non-show of This Is Not A Gateway will be aired.
It's a full evening; hope you'll be along.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: July 2011
Crossing Lines: Wednesday 6th July 2011: New Academic Building room 3.14 6-8pm
This is very much an open-house session with vacations current or impending & with papers & thesis at the same stage. So.....If you want to pop in with something on spec then that would be fine and dandy.
Hugh Look will be showing photographs of unidentified European cities and unidentified US suburbs.
Catherine O'Shea will presenting work from the Elephant and Castle.
John Levett will be showing presenting an "early stages" piece on fragmentation and representing memory.
Matters relating to the Elephant and Castle exhibition at Linear House Gallery (18th-31th July 2011) will get a brief time slot if there are any issues needing clarification. Work-in-imagination or work-in-progress is always fine and if you'd like a spot during the evening to air it then please mail me
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: June 2011
Crossing Lines: Wednesday 1st. June: New Academic Building: Room 3.14: 6-8pmJudith Jones will be showing work on a new project Loughton: From village to reality show idiom She writes: "Loughton has become the epitome of the unreal reality show TOWIE (The only way is Essex). Nail bars and clubs made famous by the show reside on the grounds of shops and ancient inns. Underneath it all middle England survives—remnants of life as it was fifty years ago remain. The large evergreen tree still retains the gigantic coloured Christmas bulbs which remain all year waiting to delight yet another generation of children at Christmas time. The post office where mothers chatted meeting their friends is now a Wetherspoons pub –‘The last Post’ - and serves much the same purpose. My work examines this eclectic centre of Loughton where the ancient Lopping Hall stands beside The Venus Clinic for cosmetic surgery-Botox and boob jobs."
Michael Rodgers will be showing work-in-progress towards the forthcoming Elephant & Castle exhibition. This currently consists of a scattering of coloured recollections past, present, and future.
Astrid Baerndal will be showing altered images from the day around Elephant &Castle. Her inspiration has been the textures and colours on site in combination with the legacy of memories of socialistic Swedish architecture from the late 60s.
Matters relating to the Crossing Lines Elephant & Castle Exhibition at Linear House Gallery [18th. July to 31st. July] will get a brief time slot.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing lines: May 2011
Crossing Lines: Wednesday 4th May: New Academic Building: Room 3.14: 6-8pmHugh Look will be presenting work from Life Among the Dead considering the cemetery as a public space. He will also be asking for feedback on Europaville: a rational anonymity juxtaposed with photographs from the New Jersey suburbs. Hugh writes: "The link with the cemeteries project is that these are also in part reflections on public and private space and (covertly) the starting point for a wider-ranging consideration of the ethics of street photography."
Claire Haslam writes: "I am continually trying to find ways 'beyond' the photograph, frustrated by its monolithic, problematic claim to 'capture' 'reality'. Current experiments are in combining images in order to think about how they modify each other and offer the possibility of multiplying, rather than fixing, meaning. I also continue to look for ways to incorporate words into the image."
Nick Scammell will be showing further work-in-progress from the billboards project. Nick writes: "This project seeks to explore what happens when images of the ignored, forgotten or unlikely are placed into new public contexts; the visual half of a year-long photo-poetic project focused on half a dozen areas of transition within London. My aim is to produce a series of photographs and a cycle of poems responding to these changing areas - exploring the mystery of resonance, interrogating the passing for the enduring and tracing the hazy line between reality and imagination that the combination of single and composite images can illustrate." Poetry included.
Tony Othen has very generously offered us the exhibition space at Linear House Gallery in Greenwich. We now have two dates available & we can take time this evening to open a discussion on how to best use these opportunities
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: March 2011
Crossing Lines: Tuesday 8th. March: New Academic Building: Room 3.14: 6-8pmThis month's meetup is earlier than usual but here is the projected line-up for the March meeting:
Judith Jones has been continuing her work on the Dorset 'village' of Poundbury and its residents & she will be presenting her most recent findings.
Claire Haslam, Alex McIlhiney and Christian von Wissel will be sharing their most recent visual (images and imaginaries) and written impressions of Canary Wharf; with and without camera and orientation, above and below ground. A mental map emerged.
John Levett will be presenting early work from recent detours in Wigan, Skelmersdale and Widnes and would welcome indications of how the initial results might be developed.
Please feel free to drop in with unannounced work or simply unannounced.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: February 2011
Crossing Lines: Tuesday 15th. February: New Academic Building: Room 3.14: 6-8pmHere is the projected line-up for the February meeting:
Nick Scammell will be presenting work generated from the Elephant & Castle Convergence. Others who took part in this will also be around to give their early responses & ideas for future work
Judith Jones writes: Capturing images at twilight, my new work continues to revolve around an interest of the lived spaces in the varied and somewhat disjointed buildings in Poundbury village, Dorset. I have also have been intrigued by the bollards seemingly dividing Poundbury from Dorchester put up by The Duchy at various points in roads during the first phase of the construction.
James Cashmore will be presenting work from the Three Mills Detour last December.
Please feel free to drop in with unannounced work or simply unannounced.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: February 2011
The Elephant & Castle
The Elephant & Castle: a Crossing Lines convergenceA bitterly cold Sunday the 6th of February 2011
An idea to be followed in spirit; in part; in imagination; memorably; in memory of; materially; matter (of factly). Consider the Elephant & Castle as the centre of a universe. Approach it from a distant point of choice … the Oval, New Cross Gate, Waterloo, London Bridge, Southwark, Tower Bridge, Camberwell Green. Record the quality of your anticipation.
Arrive at 11.00 in front of Elephant & Castle tube by the Shopping Centre [Northern Line] where we will hold a brief symposium on the character of our experience of the morning, our preferences, our priorities.
Maps & directions of varying sizes & worth, accompanied by opinions & tips, will then be distributed.
Individually or mob-handed we will assault the neighbourhood whilst discarding all preconceptions & heretofore practices of photographing urban materiality & emerge with work matching the ethereal quality of the first Pet Shop Boys single or the obsessive complexity of John Coltrane’s last solo.
Later that same day … if we’re still standing we can meet up & plot a future for ourselves within this Project.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
More details: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing lines January 2011
Crossing Lines: Tuesday 11th. January: New Academic Building: Room 3.14: 6-8pmHere is the projected line-up for the January meeting:
Nick Scammell will be showing the first steps of an experimental work revolving around the appropriation of billboards and other promotional surfaces on his local high street in East Finchley, replacing generic adverts with images of forgotten or ignored corners of East Finchley. Local pictures creating a new local context. Nick is keen to get some early feedback.
Claire Haslam writes: I'm working on developing a piece of work, We Happy Few, that I'd previously thought of as complete. I made a 'visual poem' through a process of combination and erasure of three texts relating to war, jingoism and imperialism. I am now using Google Images as a 'tool' to associate images with each phrase of this poem-text. I'm interested in the internet's ability to display meanings that individuals have attached to images (through naming them and in other ways associating descriptive text with images) and the way that the internet seems to provide an insight into a collective reception of images and their meanings, and how my mind filters and reacts to this collective data.
John Levett will be promoting a discussion arising from Christian von Wissel's presentation 'Photographing Materiality' and Judith Jones remembrances of the Elephant & Castle area in the 1970s. We now have a small group interested in pursuing a project centered upon this south London hub.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines-collaboration between CUCR & London Independent Photography (LIP)
Crossing Lines: a collaboration between CUCR & London Independent Photography (LIP)
Meeting: monthly on third Tuesday
Goldsmiths RHB 356
6pm-8pm
May 18
June 15
July 20
August 17
September 21
October 19
November 16
December 21
Crossing Lines is an on-going forum for collaboration between photographers & researchers whose central interest is the urban situation, its constituents & its dynamics.
It seeks to provide:
• a valuable resource for developing a photographic practice
• an opportunity to pursue a joint project away from academic demands
• expanding contacts within photography
• an additional audience for research-in-progesss
• an alternative channel for disseminating a project
• the prospect of working with someone who might challenge one’s assumptions
It encourages:
• innovative approaches to collaboration at distance
• serendipitous encounters
• accidental outcomes
It believes that:
• everyone benefits from the sharing of supportive reactions to their work
• photography in itself, and in the service of a wider project, is a developmental and explorative
process which can benefit from partnership with others
• experimental work that has no formal platform for presentation benefits from a sympathetic forum
It is open to:
• all members of London Independent Photography
• all students, researchers and staff of CUCR
• all those who have been associated with CUCR and who seek a point of contact for continued
practical involvement
Please contact
John Levett john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: April meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 4th April 2012
Here is the lineup for the April meetup of Crossing Lines:
Simon Head writes: “Some of my recent work explores the idea of a conceptual interface between 3D and 2D. 3D subject and the 2D printed photograph. Photographs of structures taken from both the front and the side - these two perspectives presented as a diptych - relating directly to the conventions of mechanical drawing - photographic information in an isometric composition.”
Judith Jones subject will be derived from her current Ph.D. work: The Urban Village Concept: Using Poundbury, Dorset as a case study for research.
Alex McIlhiney writes: “Following my visit to the gHost seminars I will present some sketchy ideas of who may become the ghosts of tomorrow. This includes promising young footballers and former eastenders actresses. I will also have an update on the Canary Wharf project and my plan to take a psychic around the site to gather their 'impressions'.”
Claire Reddleman writes: “I'm working on some sketches for a series, looking at excising text (and possibly all sorts of deliberate signs) from images of a journey through a street. This is proving more complicated than expected and pushing me to think about how photographing differs from perceiving - in that the way I conceived this idea is proving very difficult to realise; it seems that I notice things around me in a way that is very different to how they can appear in a photograph.”
More too on Claire’s ‘Oppositional High Street 2012’ detour that counters the hegemonic triumphalist narrative of High Street 2012
Michael Rodgers will be presenting his sketchbooks of current M.A work dealing with the study of figures in urban space and imaginative layering over the scene.
Len Salem will be presenting recently published work—‘A Train Journey in Winter’.
Blog here: http://cucrlip.wordpress.com/
Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crossing_lines
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com
Crossing Lines: May meetup: New Academic Building Room 3.26: 6 - 8 pm: Wednesday 2nd May 2012
Here is the lineup for the May meetup of Crossing Lines:
Len Salem will be presenting recently published work — A Train Journey in Winter.
Sabes Sugunasabesan has been working in the Kings Cross area along with much of the labouring population of the capital and will be sharing his thoughts on the direction of this project. He will be seeking feedback from the group on its current state and possible directions.
Michael Rodgers and Nick Scammell will be jointly curating the first of this year's Crossing Lines exhibitions. The theme will be Memorial. Michael and Nick will be unveiling their initial thoughts on the word, the implication, the concept, the rationale.
The first of Claire Reddleman's Pennine Street Trespasses took place last Tuesday. John Levett will show the cluster of images he made along the route and will invite speculation upon what they represent regarding their relation to the trespass, to history and to inner states.
Contact: john.levett1@gmail.com