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press release
MOSTYN, Wales’ (UK) foremost contemporary visual arts centre, is delighted to announce a new season of exhibitions:
Mladen Bizumic: Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13.
In dialogue with the exhibition by artist Laurence Kavanagh
Taking a snapshot glance, Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13. by Austrian-based, and New Zealand-raised, artist Mladen Bizumic focuses on the company Kodak—a point of exposure in Bizumic's work—and pictures the transition from film-based photography to digital imaging as it developed.
Through photography and sculpture Kodak Employed 140,000 People. Instagram 13. filters a timeline of Kodak's development, from its founding in 1880 to its subsequent demise in 2012 when the company filed for bankruptcy. Splicing in a chronological parallel—which enlarges on conservative, corporate hubris, as well as its failings and obsolescence—the exhibition also offers a salutary tale of the shortcomings of being overexposed while not being committed to full development. The pace of digital technology is relentless and its replacement of many analogue devices is undeniable. Yet, that Kodak invented the world’s first digital camera, a medium that would force the company to file for bankruptcy, is difficult to believe and brought both into focus and blurred in a number of Bizumic's works.
Recording a history of photography, lighting it both positively and negatively, the exhibition’s parts come to form a canon of sorts of technology's progression, and it leads right through to the present with today’s available means of taking snapshots, and sharing them.
The exhibition is curated by Adam Carr, Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN, in dialogue with the exhibition by artist Laurence Kavanagh, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, MOSTYN. Both exhibitions are part of the "Conversation Series," an ongoing series placing two solo exhibitions in conversation.
Bizumic's exhibition is kindly supported by Creative New Zealand, The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.
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Laurence Kavanagh: Segue Galleries 4 & 5
Through a combination of media such as sculpture, collage and photo-montage, Kavanagh’s work engages with the idea of visual representation: more specifically, photographic and cinematic practices become a ground of research for what it means to see and to be seen, to represent and to be represented, and ultimately how to navigate the relational space between “image life” (what we make visually of the world) and “real life” (what the world actually is).
For the series "March" presented in MOSTYN, Kavanagh recently worked on site at the Curzon Mayfair cinema in London, taking casts from architectural details and rubbings of surfaces of the building, reworking them as traces that generate reminders, conversations and references for other works to appear. The images embedded in the collages are generated by Kavanagh’s memories of certain films that were shown at the Curzon since it opened in 1934, most recently The Revenant and Anomalisa—both were screening and audible through the walls while he was making his work there.
In the group of works, "October," Kavanagh cast a series of projection screens used by a cinema cooperative in the North of England. One cast is delicately layered upon another, embedding the memories, echoes and residue that accompany them. In MOSTYN, Kavanagh takes this idea further, using the physical relationship with the Victorian architecture of Gallery 4 and 5 to test how meaning is produced within the screen.
The exhibition is curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, MOSTYN, in dialogue with the exhibition by Mladen Bizumic, curated by Adam Carr, Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN. Both exhibitions are part of the "Conversation Series," an ongoing series placing two solo exhibitions in conversation.
Kavanagh's exhibition is kindly supported by Marlborough Contemporary, London, and APT (Artist Pension Trust).