Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Sat 18 Mar-Sun 11 Jun
If ever you’re in an arty mood on a rainy day, Chapter Arts is the place to be. For almost four months, the Chapter Gallery will be hosting a new exhibition in live art entitled These Rotten Words and will be coinciding with Experimentica, Chapter’s annual live art festival. Comprising of eight artists in total, this exhibition will explore exactly what it means to be ‘rotten’, with the gallery indulging in the discovery of new portrayals of art’s secret language and its effects on human life.
Among the works on display are a wide range of very intimate, gestural art by some already very well established figures in this form. For example, Rebecca Ackroyd will be adding her input to the theory that gesture is the only language natural to the body, showing off her own adaptation of a bodily gesture. Given that much of her previous work has included a larger-than-life pair of human legs sans the rest of the body, this should be right up her creative street. I for one am hopeful that, should she choose to add some form of rotten gesture to these legs, she does it with a bit more intrigue.
Anna Barham’s work is a lot more sensory, consisting of a single-screen video capturing the existence of an exotic insect whose wings provide something of a sonic camouflage, blending in to other noises around it. Joining her in this examination of sound over sight include Marie-Michelle Deschamps and Anneke Kampman, who similarly work exclusively with the sonic and acoustic properties of the human voice. Kampman’s piece is set to provide something of a narrative to the exhibition, which should be interesting since – in my own experience – art has no narrative structure.
In a more traditional form of art, David Austen will be providing a series of figurative water colours to accompany a text painting. Due to Austen’s previous work with water colours often consisting of naked humans performing sexual acts upon each other, intriguing is one of many words I would use to describe this exhibition.
Admission: free. Info: 029 2030 4400 / www.chapter.org
words MAXWELL JONES