Muddy

Tree house (with milk)

Photo/drawing
This is a new piece I made for my lovely friend Lucy's film and art event Purple Wednesday
Come down to the Bay Horse (Thomas Street, Manchestie) on Wednesday 17th, from 8 to watch some films, eat some cake, drink some tasty foriegn beer and BUY SOME ART!!! There will be lots of work on sale from upcoming Manchester artists.

She's raising money for Raleigh Intenational (check out their good deeds here:
http://www.raleighinternational.org/about-raleigh/charitable-objectives) so please come along this Wednesday, dig deep and buy some art.

Discerning Eye Prize, 11th November 2010

How to behave at a swish private view: drink as much of the free wine as possible (NEVER refuse top ups), talk loudly about how rubbish other people's work is, take pictures of yourself pointing at your own work with a goofy smile on your face, giggle like children during the boring speeches, etc etc...

Oh so much fun was had at Thursday's preview. Didn't win any prizes (I quite fancied that £5000 purchase prize, but ya know) but felt insanely proud to be showing in this exhibition amongst established artists and newer artists alike. I was really impressed by the standard of the selection, which made me feel all the more giddy to be there.

Have a little looky here at the online catalogue (maybe even buy, eh?):
http://www.discerningeye.org/exhibition/gallery/gallery.php

Binge analysis

Does 4 count as a binge? 5 definitely does.

A new thing with an old thing in it

One of my photo/paintings has been accepted into the ING Discerning Eye Prize and will be part of the Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London, opening Thrsday 11th Novemebr and running until the 21st.

This is rather exciting isn't it? Ok, so there are about 200 other artists showing in this exhibition, but I'm super chuffed to be one of 'em. This will be the first time I've shown in London, and in a proper gallery with a gift shop and everything.

If you find yourself in that London do come and have a look.


Exhibition details here:
http://www.discerningeye.org/exhibition/intro/intro.php

Now this is pretty old

And should definitely be filed under 'Things that happened a little while ago'. But I like it.

I made this animation about 2 years ago, and last year it won the Oxfam short film competition at The Deaf Institute, Manchester.

In The Beginning Was

A short animation about a man acquiring his first word, narrated by a former word addict.

Film by Kelly Parish.
Story and Narration by Elinor Taylor


You can watch here:

Queer Kraak

Queer Kraak Exhibition
25th - 31st August, Kraak gallery, Manchester.

Group show of Queer manchester Artists to coincide with Pride weekend.
Initially I thought this was a dreadful premise for an exhibition. Actually, I still do. My sexuality is not relevant to the work I make, and generally I don't really care for work that is too focused on the artist's personal life, prefering work that has a universality about it and allows for a broader interpretation, without the viewer having to be aware of any background information to be able to appreciate it. But, I thought I might as well do it anyway.

The work I made for this show reflected my discomfort with the theme of the show. I never make explictly personal work, and although I'm fantastically comfortable with my sexuality; its mine, and not up for interpretation or debate as I put forward my art to be. So the work I showed incorporated a very personal element; I used old family photos, the first time I'd done this. But the way I edited them negated that personal element. I painted objects and images from my memories of my family into the photographs, but these were so personal that there would be no possibility of any viewer being able to gain any insight into the story behind the image. The work was deliberately ambigious to the point of being meaningless.

Images from the private view are available here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44087667@N06/4992358135/in/photostream/

Blog Binge

Well, it has been a little while...
I haven't exactly been prolific with this blogging lark, so far anyway. I have bucket loads of excuses though.

A summer of weirdness; heartbreak, and the usual inertia and inability to produce anything that comes with it, have amounted to a prolonged period of silence. But of late I have been sauntering back from the realm of the unsane and entering a significantly happier period of BINGE MAKING. And also BINGE DOING. So I thought I'd better post all this up before I go all weird again. Afterall; THE TIME IS NOW.

There will now follow far too many blog posts for one night.

Things that happened a little while ago #1

Degree Show

Manchester School of Art, 19th -23rd June 2010



















My degree show comprised of 21 images all made from the same negative. The photographs had the same starting point but each was manipulated differently, producing 21 different possible narratives for one moment in time.

Degree Show Degree Show Degree Show Degree Show Degree Show

Lack of interweb and setting up degree show means distinct lack of blog posts recently.

But...

DEGREE SHOW!!!
Come and see our degree show, it's truely wonderful. Manchester School of Art, Grovesner Building, Cavendish Street, Manchester.
19th - 23rd June 2010

Pans

Feed me

I'm rubbish at updating my blog.
I am, however, quite good at painting chips.

Meanwhile, also at A Foundation.

I've been helping artist Jacob Dahlgren construct his new installation for The Economy of the Gift exhibition.

This mainly involves painting A LOT of wooden blocks, and to a lesser extent; wearing stripes, shivering, eating Mars bars, listening to insane Radio 2 phone ins and generally having a pretty good time.

I've been working on the installation for the past week, and its getting rather exciting as Jacob pieces all the bits together. A huge, brightly coloured beast of a piece is taking shape.

The Economy of the Gift opens at A Foundation, Liverpool this Thursday, and is on until May 22nd.



http://www.jacobdahlgren.com/
http://www.afoundation.org.uk/liverpool/details.php?id=50

I could never live like you do

I could never live like you do is a film/performance by Rebecca Lennon, to be exhibited at A Foundation as part of the upcoming The Economy of the Gift show - http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Foundation/46944041833#!/event.php?eid=314472468887&ref=mf

Myself and around thirty others are taking part in this piece. Last week, on a very cold set at A Foundation, we filmed a version of the performace that will be screened throughout the duration of The Economy of The Gift exhibition.

The performance is based on an image of a North Korean mass demonstration (on a smaller scale) taken from the singular perspective of a national (UK) newspaper. In its recreation, the political ideology of the original image will be erased, and the performance will instead focus on colour, gesture and pattern alone. The performance will explore our distanced and cinematic relationship to ‘foreign’ political images and create a tension between personal and collective, local and global, intimacy and distance.

The piece will be performed at the opening of The Economy of the Gift at A Foundation, Liverpool, Thursday 9th April.

www.rebeccalennon.co.uk

Charles Merewetherin 'Art and the Archive' (Documents of Contemporary Art) -

"In 'Archives of the Fallen' I briefly describe the practice of three Latin American artists; Rosangela Renno, Milagros de la Torre and Eugine Dittborn, each of whom seek to recover photographic traces of the bodies of those consigned to dissapear to the archive. They question what photography resembles and forgets, and for whom and for what purpose. in doing so they detabalise its authority as a technology of rememberance."

(thank you Charlotte sometimes)

Work in progress

Since I made this blog to write about and show my work, I should probably start putting some pictures on here...

I make photographs in the darkness of the dark, darkroom. In my delightfully messy studio I erase parts of them, draw on them and paint on them.

I often make work in sequences, using the same image over and over, but manipulating each individual photograph differently to produce works that share a starting point, but are essentially different.
Things that are happening now:

Ok, now on to the 'difficult second post'.

I'm an artist, currently in my third year at Manchester School of Art, so I'll be using this blog to write about my work, and show you pictures of it, and try and get you to come and look at it.

I also currate shows and put on various art events, some rather surreal. So I'll be banging on about that too.

I'm the co-organiser of Manchester Art Crawl, a project devised by myself and a few friends which aims to take over the many closed down shops and businesses around the city centre, thus revitalising these abandoned spaces and creating temporary gallery spaces. You can read about last year's Art Crawl, which was part of the fantastic Not Part Of Festival, here, if you do Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=77676014799&ref=ts
There will be another Crawl happening at the end of the summer, so watch this space.

In the mean time, here's a picture of some cold buttered toast

Hello there.
This is all very new and Excitng, isn't it.