MODERN TERRA

Alexis Dirks, Allison Gibbs & Christian Newby

A semi-collaborative outdoor intervention beside The Forth & Clyde Canal

Presented as part of the 2010 glasgow international festival of visual art

Modern Terra is an open, parallel domain; a canal-side drop in, drop out HQ for new-age nomads and urban ramblers.

Weaving new post-industrial narratives, Modern Terra sees Glasgow Based artists Alexis Dirks, Allison Gibbs and Christian Newby conjure an aspirational segue within this interstitial canal-side landscape, where borders and ownership dissipates leaving superstition, nostalgia and fiction to run rampant.

For two weeks the land will become a site of possibility, hosting a community of relational objects, sounds, images and speculations to entice the curious and the brave. The long standing tradition of water’s edge social engagement will be rigorously perpetuated with Chinese barbecues, an open air film screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s Psychadelic classic The Holy Mountain and a one-off event aboard The Gipsy Princess.

Commandeering the five-metre high original brick wall that embanks the canal as a site of idealistic projection, Alexis Dirks’ large-scale intervention, Corner Vistacompels us to submit to a heady simulacrum of nostalgia and representation in offering up a new and fictitious landscape. Through processes of editing, deleting, rescaling and fragmenting, Corner Vista explores the boundaries between where a geographical landscape and an internal landscape might begin, end, and overlap with one another and presents an alternative vista situated within an incongruous territory.

In direct reference to signs of informal movement through the Wasteland itself Allison Gibbs’ Inland Navigations Void draws upon Ignasi Sola de Morales’ idea of Potential in Terrain Vague, home horticulture and clandestine journeying to simultaneously incite acts of nomadic intervention and speculate spurious migratory mythologies. Utilitarian in nature, the objects and planting along the site’s peripheral boundaries act as path-making possibilities, linking inexplicitly to the drift of The Gipsy Princess a one-off installation and journey on the last Sunday of the Festival. (Departing from Speirs Wharf Mooring, Sunday May 2^nd, 2pm)

Combining elements of architectural and political ruins, science fiction, and functionality Christian Newby’s new sculptural work for Modern Terra Ba-Umfconveys a potential fictitious structure between the object itself and those who occupy the derelict urban land in which it sits. By imposing a seemingly discarded item, resembling a kind of slouching home furnishing and covered dubiously in the text and images of events past, into the Wasteland the natural order of detritus remains undisrupted, giving rise to the potential of an event that exists playfully between function and narrative manipulation to occur.

Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art is a unique event in the cultural calendar. Taking place in the city every other year, the Festival comprises groundbreaking and dynamic presentations in contemporary visual art practice, across a range of exhibitions, public projects, talks, performances and screenings by both local and international artists. The Festival will take place in venues and locations throughout the city from Friday 16th April – Monday 3rd May 2010. Visit www.glasgowinternational.org for further details.

The artists would like to acknowledge the generous support of The Hope Scott Trust, The Forth &Clyde Canal Society, Gary Watt from ISIS Water Regeneration and Gerry McLaughlin from Glasgow North Regeneration Agency

Alexis Dirks was born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1982 and lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated with an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009 and in completed her BFA with Honors from the University of Manitoba in 2006. Recent exhibitions include ‘Information Wants to Be Free’, in collaboration with London based collective Gandt, 2009; ‘Set It Up And Go’, Artnews Projects, Berlin, 2009; and Fugue County, Sweet Geranium Gallery, Glasgow, 2009. Alexis Dirks is the recipient of a visual arts grant from The Hope Scott Trust, 2010.

Allison Gibbs (b.1978 Penrith, Australia) graduated with a BFA(Hons) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia in 2005 and is currently based in Glasgow, UK. Recent exhibitions include Temporary Nature at Pacific Quay, Self-made Cavalcade presented as part of the 2009 Edinburgh Arts Festival, Arribada Pursuit at Glasgow Project Room and a group exhibition at Intermedia, CCA Glasgow with Jon Thomson and Pio Abad. In 2009 Gibbs initiated Palm Place, an ongoing curatorial project that seeks to commission new, site-specific work in peripheral city spaces and urban terrain vagues. Recent awards include a Hope Scott Trust Award, Glasgow Visual Artists Grant and a Scottish Arts Council Creative and Professional Development Award in 2010. Forthcoming projects include a residency at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and a research trip to Switzerland to investigate geological simulation and architectural anomaly in alpine military bunkers.

Christian Newby, b. 1979 in Virginia Beach, VA. Lives and works in Glasgow. A recent MFA graduate from the Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include, Gazing Ball at the Glasgow Project Room and Set It Up and Go at Artnews Projects, Berlin. Christian Newby received a visual artists grant from The Hope Scott Trust in 2010.

LOCATION

The Speirs Wharf Wasteland is located at the end of Farnell Street in Garscube Industrial Estate. It sits directly in between The Glue Factory (venue for The FINN Collective’s Kiss of Life) and the Forth & Clyde Canal at Speirs Wharf.