Cover Versions

About

An original artwork is often used as the starting point of new creative acts. It can be re-purposed, subverted and reclaimed by artists, musicians, and fans. The exhibition addresses concepts of ownership, fandom and audience, authenticity, and the economic and cultural values that site and shape them. The exhibition features internationally acclaimed artists, musicians and film makers from the UK, the USA, Australia, Japan, and Austria with newly commissioned work alongside key examples of their established practice.

OTOMO YOSHIHIDE, PEOPLE LIKE US, BUTTRESS O'KNEEL, STEVE KEENE, GRAHAM DOLPHIN, EVEREST PIPKIN, ANDREW TIFT, OLIVER LARIC, DAVID RISLEY, AND ANTHONY DOLPHIN.

OTOMO YOSHIHIDE (JAPAN)
Turntable Discs, 2022 Photographic prints

Otomo Yoshihide is a composer, musician and sound installation artist of international renown and a giant gure in the development of abstract and experimental noise music. His music extends from the extremes of saturated noise to the quietest, minimal gestures of onkyo in settings as diverse as his orchestrations for big bands and giant ensembles to his free improvisations in solo performance.

Born in Yokohama, Japan in 1959, formative encounters with the music of Derek Bailey and the teaching of free jazz pioneer Takayanagi Masayuki, accelerated his love of the “uncontrollable” elements of playing amplied instruments, and a curiosity to develop a singular vocabulary of extended technique on guitar, turntables, live electronics and sampling. Since his rst recordings in the late 1980s, Yoshihide has made over 100 albums and composed more than 80 scores for lm and television. He has convened a number of groups from the seminal Ground Zero in 1990, to Filament, I.S.O, ONJQ and the huge “chaos conduction” ensembles gathered as part of his events for Fukushima staged in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Otomo has collaborated with a vast array of artists, including Luc Ferrari, Sergey Kuryokhin, John Zorn, Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris, Jim O’Rourke, Sabu Toyozumi, Christian Marclay and his early heroes, Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey, but he is equally at home with a form of community practice working with non-musicians, as seen in his work in Fukushima and residency at the YCAM in Yamaguchi. Otomo’s sound installation for 127 portable record players, ‘Without Records’ (2008), transxed its viewers visually and aurally, its automation a further demonstration of Otomo’s attraction to “not being in control”.

The series of photographic prints, ‘Turntable Discs’ were produced especially for ‘Cover Versions’. They show the highly distressed surfaces of records Otomo has used in his extraordinary turntable performances over the years, the physical scars of an often abusive method and intense, physical enquiry into the range and properties of sound that can be wrought from turntables, vinyl discs, and cartridge needles. In their own way, the photographs are a record of Otomo’s lifelong pursuit of something that “does not demand a quick solution”.
http://otomoyoshihide.com/en/ 
https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/artists/otomo-yoshihide 

PEOPLE LIKE US (UK)
The Mirror, 2018
Digital film with soundtrack
Duration 35 minutes

Since 1992, artist Vicki Bennett (under the name People Like Us) has developed an immediately recognisable aesthetic, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with a dark and witty take on popular culture. Working across a range of sources, including performance, radio, streaming and installation, Bennett carefully selects her found material to form new structures and readings.

The Mirror splices together snippets from films with unique, sample-based music. The work explores the masks we wear when represented through a lens, using parallel narratives across the screen to show an ever-changing stream, rather than a singular, xed subject, narrative or moment in time. Bennett has said of her practice, “I see sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form.” Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant.”
https://peoplelikeus.org/2018/the-mirror-a-new-live-a-v-performance-by-people-like-us/

BUTTRESS O'KNEEL (USA)
Audiobook, 2020
Sound work, looped

Buttress O'Kneel has been making plunderphonic sound art since the late 20th Century, and has somehow still not been sued into oblivion by a dominant corporate culture eager to take creativity away from the people and sell it back to us at a prot. Her art explores the charged intersection of self-empowerment, social-empowerment, anti-authoritarianism, post-modernism, social critique, playfulness, anarchic joy, and a striving for sounds-yet-unheard. It is a folk-art based in the fundamental truth that we are all biological sampling machines, organic remixers, and there is nothing more primal than the sharing of matter and energy.

For ‘Cover Versions’, O’Kneel will present her 2020 audio work ‘Audiobok’ in an expanded form with tracks not included in the original released version. Readings from audio books are her source material, sliced and spliced into a new form and narrative. O’Kneel has said about the work, “There was a period a few years ago there where everyone I knew was listening to audiobooks. As I'd already spent decades cutting up music and documentaries and advertisements and movies, it seemed only right that I give the ubiquitous audiobook a bash. And so, I went to the local library and borrowed a bunch of unrelated English-speaking audiobooks - the only thing I looked for was a range of voices, American, British, Australian, male, female, for a more "cut-up" sound. I had no plot in mind. I was not even thinking along narrative lines, they just emerged.

The whole release was really a surrealist/dada piece of meaningless gibberish, but it has the feel of a narrative work, simply because our brains are wired to make stories out of data, one of the surprising aspects of the nished work is that even when a sentence is made of cut-up words in a multitude of genders and geographical accents, the brain makes it mean something. It's like the brain is so primed to turn data into meaning that even when it knows there is no meaning there, it acts as though there is.” https://buttressokneel.bandcamp.com/  

EVEREST PIPKIN (USA)
Laceworks, 2020
Digital film
Ellinger, TX, 2018
Generative video artwork
The Library of Free Objects, 2017-ongoing
Printed books and 3-D Printed objects

Based in New Mexico, USA Pipkin is a drawing and software artist who produces intimate work with large data sets. Working with online archives, big data repositories, and other resources for digital information, Pipkin reworks and reclaims the now corporate internet space back to the personal.

Everest will present three works for Cover Versions, ‘Lacework’ uses articial neural networks to reinscribe the videos of MIT’s Moments in Time Dataset. Using algorithms that stretch time and add details to images, Pipkin creates a series of hallucinatory slow-motion vignettes from the videos of everyday actions that form the collection. ‘Ellinger, TX’ is a durational generative video artwork, based on a real small town that is situated on the intersection of two major interstate highways between Austin and Houston, TX. The artwork is a piece of software that runs itself- a simulation of a town removed from the world. As the simulation is run, the ‘characters’ of the town develop habits, preferences, and friendships. ‘The Library of Free Objects’ is a series of printed books and models. These books and objects are encyclopedias of 3d models, sourced from creative commons online repositories. Acting both as printed reference material and as a survey of forms, the free objects books point to underlying assumptions about what a perfect object is.

Writing about working with the huge ‘Moments In Time‘ dataset, “Very slowly, over and over, my body learns the rules and edges of the dataset. I come to understand so much about it; how each source is structured, how the videos are found, the words that are caught in the algorithmic gathering. I see the subjects of the videos, the people living their lives. I meet their dogs, I see their homes. I see wild animals, strange weather, places I’ll never get to visit, video games I haven’t played. I see so much life... I see all these millions of lives, all of this infinite detail, this lacy intricacy that grows ever more granular the closer I get, then grows again, and again.” https://unthinking.photography/articles/on-lacework 
https://everest-pipkin.com/#  

ANDREW TIFT (UK)
Doppleganger Series, 2022
Each 31 x 55cm Acrylic on board with record cover
English portrait artist Andrew Tift is renowned internationally for his realistic drawings and paintings. His meticulously observed and detailed work is the result of an extremely exacting process with each painting taking many hundreds of hours to complete. He won the BP Portrait of the Year Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1995 for his triptych of Kitty Garman, Lucien Freud’s rst wife. His work is included in many public and private collections around the world.

For ‘Cover Versions’, Tift is exhibiting three paintings from his ‘Doppelganger Series’, one created especially for the exhibition. In a departure from his normal portraits, these paintings are an attempt to memorialise an object, in this case record covers. With his customary detail, Tift depicts not only the imagery of the sleeves but their history - the creases, scus, tears, and discolouration. Presented alongside the painting are the sleeves themselves. The mass produced and nearly worthless objects are elevated through Tift’s devotion – a transfiguration of charity shop junk into icons of our recent past.

Tift has said about the work, “It was an exercise in purely objective painting, to almost recreate the original object in paint…exactly the same size. It reects my interest in diptychs, realism and objects. The records in this series are not necessarily my choice of artist, rather that I found them in charity shops or people gave them to me. It was the damage and erosion which interested me and their connection to a specic period in time”. www.andrewtift.co.uk/ www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp59010/andrew-tift
 

ANTHONY DOLPHIN (UK)
An Elaborate Cover Story For Music That Might Not Even Exist, 2021-2022
Printed record sleeves on card
New Graft, 2006-2022
Digital collage on paper
Anthony Dolphin (born Tittensor, 1968) is an insignicant gure in the history of European art and is likely to remain so for many millennia. He pretends to take solace in the Napoleonic reckoning that “glory is fleeting but obscurity lasts forever" and the construction of biographies written in the third person. He was belatedly awarded a controversial, rst-class degree in Fine Art from the University of Reading in 1992 after he was arrested for sending a letter bomb to his tutor, Roger Cook, and having his dissertation seized by the police. An appeal by Terry Frost and others in the department saved him from expulsion and further prosecution.

On the sound advice of Stewart Home’s Art Strike, Dolphin stopped making visual art for a number of years, gaining Masters' degrees in both Aesthetics and Linguistics, living and working in Greece and Japan, and writing and performing with the cult Anglo-Japanese band, Santa Sprees - making music "largely without modern parallel."

Dolphin first began making torn paper collages from film and pop star studio portraits as a teenager and has continued to make work in this mode in the series ‘New Graft’ – a selection of which can be seen in ‘Cover Versions’.

The five record sleeves that make up ‘An Elaborate Cover Story For Music That Might Not Even Exist’ are wholly explained by their title. Of this work and others Anthony says, “even terrible art and music transcend the earthbound tyranny of words. Why would I want to anchor it with the gravity and inadequacy of explanatory text?”

Dolphin attaches no importance at all to the production and reception of his work, selling it directly in the manner of Jad and David Fair, Jerry Smith, and Je Zenick. A political act compensating for the emptiness and social disengagement of his work. He is the older brother of the much better known and more committed artist, Graham Dolphin. https://santasprees.wixsite.com/anthonydolphin 
https://santasprees.bandcamp.com/  

OLIVER LARIC (AUSTRIA)
Versions, 2012
Duration 9 minutes Single channel digital film with soundtrack 
Austrian-born, Berlin-based artist Oliver Laric’s practice encompasses a wide range of media: sculpture, lm, online digital, and photography. At its core, his work is an exploration of the consumption and production of images in the age of the internet.

‘Versions’ is a video essay that muses on the manipulation and re-appropriation of images throughout history. The film examines how images are in constant ux and hostage to appropriation. Disney animations are reworked across multiple lms. Reportedly truthful news’ images are digitally manipulated, subsumed, and returned to the internet as parody and meme.

Talking about his approach Laric says, “I don’t see any necessity in producing images myself - everything that I would need exists, it’s just about nding it. Using an existing image creates a new image, just as with iconoclasm: the destruction of an image creates an image. Or with translation: as Jorge Luis Borges described in the oft-quoted Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, translations produce new works.”
http://oliverlaric.com/ www.tanyaleighton.com/artists/oliver-laric    

DAVID RISLEY (UK)
Heads, 2022
Water colour on paper
The reformed gallerist David Risley (UK) is now an artist, well he paints things, mainly his friends and the stu around him - Blinky, his dog, his partner lying asleep, a bathroom mirror, a vase of owers, the everyday, without a filter.

For 'Cover Versions' he has painted a series of heads on shelves, this time not from life but found images online, but still without a filter. Odd couplings emerge, half remembered faces, names, memories, all mixed but arranged and contained, a catlogued system even he doesn't quite understand.

Risley writes about his work 'In my head all art, (painting, literature, music, film etc) exists in the same place at the same time, in a kind of idea space. It’s activated by thinking about it or looking at it.

The first ‘heads’ painting I made was of a storage shelf of old, out of favour heads at Madame Tussaud’s. Ex-politicians, sportsmen, celebrities and royalty who were no longer a la mode. Then I started collecting heads. I have a folder on my phone containing over 2000 images of every kind of representation of a human head I can find, all styles, cultures, periods, materials. Ancient Greek sculpture, Thai shadow puppets, rubber horror masks, family photos, modernist doodles.

I’ve been reading a lot of ction and theory about time. Ideas about time, past, present and future all existing at once. The quantum idea of time, that there is no such thing as now. I was recently diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, one of the symptoms is time blindness, an inability to understand and function in relation to time, they say people with this syndrome understand two times - now and not now. That’s how I think of these head paintings. All of the different people, times, styles, waiting somewhere that’s not now, until we think of them and suddenly they’re all now. I think of them as all existing equally. A line drawing from an artists imagination or four smudges of colour in the background of a painting that suggest a face in shadow are as real a presence as a person in a photograph. The shelves of heads are how I see Idea Space.' https://davidrisleystudio.org/   

STEVE KEENE
69 Paintings, 2022
Acrylic on paper, 29 x 42 cm
America’s most prolic artist, Steve Keene, has an approach to painting that began in his friendships with musicians. Seeing how they were able to connect with fans selling records, CDs and merchandise directly at gigs, Keene undermines the assumed status of ne art by mass producing hundreds of paintings at a time and selling them cheaply. Keene’s practice can be seen as a direct comment on the values and authenticity of commercial systems both within and beyond the art market. He has collaborated closely with the bands Silver Jews, Pavement, The Apples in Stereo, Soul Coughing, Dave Matthews’ Band, and Merzbow – creating album art, video and stage sets, and posters.

Keene has created a series of new paintings for ‘Cover Versions’. The series began with an LP cover which is quickly copied and rendered in broad brush strokes. The next is a copy of the one before, a copy of a copy. Mass produced, but by hand, when seen in series, the paintings’ repeated gestures, mistakes and irregularities become our point of focus, the familiarity of the original image changed and reclaimed by the artist.

Keene’s work is more aligned with the world of music and performance, and close association with musicians such as David Berman. He says of his work, “I want buying my paintings to be like buying a CD: it’s cheap, it’s art, and it changes your life, but the object has no status. Musicians create something for the moment, something with no boundaries and that kind of expansiveness is what I want to come across in my work.” https://stevekeene.com/ 
www.bkmag.com/2022/02/07/painter-steve-keene-im-gonna-kill-you-with-my-art/ 
https://www.stitcher.com/show/sound-opinions/episode/an-interview-with-painter-steve-keene-203470997   

GRAHAM DOLPHIN (UK)
Tape Tree, 2022
Metal, magnetic tape variable size
Torn, 2021-22
Newspaper, tape, variable size
Working across a range of mediums, including lm, sound, drawing, sculpture, text and curatorial projects, Dolphin’s work frequently explores the self-identication of fans and the practice of idolism – the worship of an idol. He is known for his meticulous and labour-intensive process creating work in a range of media. These include his scrupulous reconstruction of “shrines” dedicated to rock stars and visited by fan communities. Dolphin draws connections between these modern sites and acts of religious pilgrimage and ritual. The work questions the appreciation, elevation and veneration of art and the artists who make it.

Graham Dolphin will also present new works in ‘Cover Versions’: a series of graphite drawings and a large sculptural piece. ‘Tape Tree’ is a tall, tangled mass of magnetic tape wrapped around a metal pole. Born from research into the Taliban’s repression of recorded music and lm, these towering sculptures were left alongside main roads as symbols of the decadence of Western culture and a warning for those tempted into viewing or listening.

‘Torn’ is an ongoing series of historical newspapers, torn into small squares and reassembled. The resulting handmade slippage creates a distorted and disjointed version of the real object.
www.grahamdolphin.co.uk  
www.seventeengallery.com/artists/graham-dolphin/