Written by Nicky Getgood on Monday, June 21st, 2010 ( Start discussion )
Tags: birthday, Ikon Eastside, Soi Project, Spotted Dog
This Friday 25th June Digbeth is Good will be two years old. On 25th June 2008 I wrote my first ever Digbeth is Good post about the Soi Project, Island exhibition at the newly opened Ikon Eastside on Fazeley Street.
To mark the occasion I’ll be washing down some birthday cake with miscellaneous alcohol in The Spotted Dog’s back garden from 6pm this Friday evening. I don’t particularly enjoy drinking alone so please come and join me if you can – everyone is welcome and it would be lovely to celebrate two years of this blog with friends old and new. :-)
Written by Nicky Getgood on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: He An, I Am What I Am, Ikon Eastside, Moat Lane Car Park, New Langton Arts, Paradise Circus, Soi Project, Tercerunquinto
When I went to a tour of Soi Project: Island at the Ikon Eastside, the guide told me about Terceruquinto’s plans to post a statement on the gallery’s back wall and wondered aloud whether or not it would be enough to fill the large room.
The answer is yes. The piece’s title I Am What I Am is cut out of the wall, exposing the brickwork, insulation and electric cabling within and the building site that is currently the rest of Ikon Eastside beyond. It’s well cool, as are Tercerunquinto. Too cool even for past commissioners, it seems. Their proposal that New Langton Arts ‘sacrifice’ their only asset the artistic archive, which the gallery understandably chickened out of, makes for inspirational freesheet reading (PDF).
After Wednesday’s launch party the Ikon bus ferried us around the corner to the Moat Lane Car Park to see He An’s installation. Cute chunky neon lettering along the top reads in Chinese and English: ‘I talked to Ah Chang on the way to work. After work I ended the relationship. I stood in Paradise Circus and cried for hours…’ It is apparently the experience of a friend of the artist’s, whose relationship broke down after she moved to the city. Birmingham – it breaks your heart.
Written by Nicky Getgood on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 ( 3 responses )
Tags: Cerne Abbas Giant, Created in Birmingham, Soi Project, Tercerunquinto
Photo courtesy of JanJan and Soi Project
I went to Ikon Eastside last Friday for a guided tour of Soi Project, Island shortly before it closed. According to the guide, the artists wanted to find out how much time viewers were prepared to ‘waste’ on this artwork.
In my case, when I went to the Launch Night, it was about 2 minutes. No-one told me that the lighting over the three-dimensional island changed from daylight to pitch black over 24 minutes, with one minute marking an hour. I arrived at ‘night-time’, declared, “I can’t see a fucking thing,” and went home.
So I’m glad Created in Birmingham persuaded me to give the piece a second chance. I felt I got a lot more seeing it at the tail-end of its showing, rather than the beginning, because it was viewers’ reactions to it that made it.
Visitors were given one sheet of stickers each upon entry to attach to the island, of buildings, swimming pools, beach umbrellas, animals and billboards. The strict sticker rationing meant creating something sizeable called for collaboration – the billboard pleading for a jungle which was duly surrounded by others’ elephants and trees was particularly touching. It also left peoples’ projects wide open to sabotage by the more mischievous.
However the best additions weren’t those using the stickers, but the spaces around them cut for some totally new creations. Someone’s reproduction of the Cerne Abbas Giant was pure genius.
Apparently the artists were just as interested in these unexpected reactions as they were to the ones more prescribed. Which leaves me wondering why the gallery worker stopped my flatmate’s insertion of a new island made of scrunched up stickers near the entrance, saying people would stumble on it. I very much doubt someone could do themselves serious damage with a small sticky ball.
According to the girl leading the tour, the Ikon are hoping the interactive Island will help Ikon Eastside achieve their aim of moving away from the formal, ‘don’t touch’ atmosphere of the Ikon Gallery to a more open, participatory space.
The next exhibition by Mexican art collective Tercerunquinto I Am What I Am opens on the 10th July. I’m told it’s to be some sort of statement on the regeneration of Eastside, possibly related to similar built environments back home in Mexico.
