Jenny Hogarth

(selected by Kirsteen Macdonald)

Jenny Hogarth's work explores cultural ritual, consumerism, pageantry and mass ornamentation. She uses a wide range of media, encompassing object-based installations, video, choreography and performance in works which, most recently, reference Edinburgh cultural imaginaries through collaborative choreographed spectacle.

In 2004 Hogarth was selected for the Collective Gallery's off-site Edinburgh Festival commission. During the festival she staged 'Pentland Rising', a performance held at the Midlothian Ski Center in the Pentland Hills on the south west periphery of Edinburgh, collaborating with skiers, musicians, historians and a choreographer to host this imitation gala spectacular: 

''Pentland Rising' redrafted the histories of parades and battles neglected by the mass spectacles of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo and Festival Fireworks. The bourgeois and innocuous pastime of skiing was wryly employed to stage a series of make-shift processions and conflicts revisiting events such as the bloody Covenanting battle at Rullion Green in 1666, the bible burning activities of Gibbites, the Friends of the People, the Pike Plot and Sir Walter Scotts George IVth pageant of tartanalia.

The performance featured a bare breasted Goddess of Liberty leading the People and the Loan Pipers Lament. The costumes, props and routines of the various radical groups depicted were all constructed and modified to fit the pageantry of a parade.  For example the bible burning activities of Gibbites, the followers of John Gibb were translated into the guise of a psychedelic hippie sect they wore matching tie dye togas and carried tambourines'. (Hogarth, 2005).

'Its Not a Fashion Parade' (2004), a video work, is an overtly sentimental and romantic display with a humorous undertone. Here, Hogarths editing manipulates the movements of the girls into a choreographed dance display. 'Demonstration' (2003), a performance work with Kim Coleman, was a theatrical yet make-shift spectacle that explored the false dichotomy between creation and destruction, innocence and experience.

Recent exhibitions include Do Not Interrupt your Activities, a performance with Kim Coleman commissioned by the MA Contemporary Curating course at the Royal College of Art, London (April 2005). 'Not Yet Titled' (2005) took inspiration from Andy Warhol's proposal to form a girl band who could not sing or play instruments, but would hold radios instead. Coleman and Hogarth's performance evoked large-scale natural disasters, so-called acts of God with the aid of performers holding slide projectors loaded with abstract and photographic images, and tape recorders playing recorded synthesizer music.

'Creative Revue', commissioned for the 2005 Glasgow International featured Coleman, Hogarth and London-based artist Babak Ghazi, presenting a combination of individually and collaboratively made work. Coleman and Hogarth presented a performance where the artists controlled a series of actions, using various chiaroscuro techniques, to engineer a climatic experience which unfolds before the eyes, momentarily averting the gaze from the experimentally crafted objects basking in its shadow.

Hogarth (b. 1979) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2000 and is now a Co-Director of The Embassy, Edinburgh. She has recently been nominated for Pilot: 2, 21-24 October, London, which co-incides with the Frieze Art Fair. 100 internationally renowned curators, artists, writers and collectors have each been asked to nominate their favorite unrepresented artist for the event. Hogarth has been nominated by Polly Staple, a London-based curator. See www.pilotlondon.org.

She lives and works in Edinburgh.

www.embassygallery.co.uk

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