Michael Curran | Dawn Gaietto | Joseph Walsh
Chelsea Fringe at Nine Elms on the South Bank
26 May – 12 June 2016
Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
The Liquid Gang Happenings at Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall
Friday 27 May 6-8.30pm
Saturday 4 June with Dave’s Bar from 6pm
As part of Chelsea Fringe at Nine Elms on the South Bank, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall celebrates the fruits of previous seedbed residencies with artists Michael Curran and Joseph Walsh in collaboration with artist Dawn Gaietto, Shanks Pony Gardener – the new tender of Dafna Talmor’s Spaceship Earth garden – and Untitled, resident gallery cat.
For Greenhouse Effect Michael Curran orchestrated a Liquid Gang Happening on 27th May, where visitors were invited to join the Gang in a mass Herb Tasting involving Herb Study and Botanical Drawing.
Since then the space has been open throughout the week for contemplation, painting and colouring in. If you’d like to have a cup of tea use the tea urn. To conduct a Herb Study – seek assistance or make your own notes about the Sage plant at the table. The microphone is switched on for those who wish to speak.
“Ave a Cup of Tea – Ave another one! Take the hand of the Liquid Gang!”
Inspired by Marc Bolan’s 1974 album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, The Liquid Gang was formed in 2015 to explore group interaction and fluid states via workshops and performance actions. Liquid Gang exercises challenge the privileging of thought and language over engagement with the sensory world, to reveal our underlying and psychic porosity. Liquid is understood in terms of a relational flow, utilisation of all the senses and the imbibing of fluids.
On Saturday 4th June there will be another Liquid Gang Happening from 6pm, coinciding with Dave’s Bar.
The upper space will close on Sunday 5th June after which documentation of the Happenings will be screened downstairs until 12th June.
Dawn Gaietto’s collective video works on screens in the Ragged Canteen and Yard seek to question the underlying effects of the modernist frame of representation on our bodies’ experiences of shared non-human substances–and the affects of shared substances on each of our bodies. In 21 Days of Summer in January (2015) an Arduino micro-controller, an SHT11x sensor and a DSLR camera record the atmosphere in response to atmospheric changes: returning to early photographer Henry Fox Talbot’s position by allowing nature to represent itself. the academy I questions the validity of collective human (un)knowledge and the severance of relational ties, whilst the academy II re-routes and re-contextualises the language of the IPCC’s (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change) scientific findings. Gaietto invites visitors to join her in engaging with the non-human and focus on her new, portable bed for the cat–enhanced with plants nurtured by Shanks Pony Gardener.
Date with Thyme (2015/16) derives from Joseph Walsh’s experience of a herbal medicine course where the herb Thyme became a corporeally shared substance through the activities of drawing and drinking. His personal rendition of differing psychic articulations is offered in contrast to more normative televisual experiences of food in narratives of controlled consumption and inspires the tactics devised by the Liquid Gang.
Date with Thyme performers: Ela Ciercierska, Holly Green, Papa Scotchie. Thanks to Michael Curran, Lisa Fannen, Paul Richards and ANDOR Gallery.
Somaesthetics | Porosity | Synesthesia I Olfactory Play | Animism – it’s gonna be grand when you take the hand of the Liquid Gang!