(selected by Karen MacKinnon)
I'm going to antler you, 2006
Juneau/Projects/ is the moniker adopted by Birmingham-based artists Philip Duckworth and Ben Sadler who began their collaboration in 2001, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Their work engages with people and folk histories bringing together music and found imagery in new interactive configurations, often produced in rural settings. Their collaborators list community groups, cub scouts, teenage bands and highland warriers, and their projects have led to the production of CDs, radio broadcasts, magazine publications and an on-line record label. At the core of their practice is a preoccupation with the relationship between technology and nature and our mediated experience of nature in the 21st century. City dwellers, they regard nature as 'alien to us, beautiful yet cruel' and technology as 'useless, foreign and ugly', once it is taken to a rural environment1.
Early works tested the limits of consumer objects such as mobile phones, computers, CD walkmans, TVs, cassette tape machines by submerging them in water, freezing them, setting them alight, grinding them down. Destroying in order to create, many works, such as 'Stalker' (2001) - where a video camera records the action of its own death - employ the very technology they are demolishing in order to record or transmit the sound of its own demise. As Nigel Prince notes, 'such experimentation and the often utopian language of their titles [further] connect Juneau/Projects/ to Romanticism', utilising the idea of a destructive urge creatively3. Recent live work has seen the sound element developing into musical performances, where the duo have taken on the stage name Juneau Brothers to perform original songs and music alongside their installations.
A performative strand runs throughout their practice, be it a recorded action, a documentation of a process or a live performance. The video 'A Rich Future is Still Ours' (2002) documents the destruction of a paper shredder as successive sheets of paper are fed through a shredder with microphones attached; in another performance, 'I am swimming through pools of cool water' (2002), one mobile phone calls another. As the conversation evolves, a blowtorch is used to set fire to the phone making the call and the receiver transits its sizzling destruction. The videos are often surrounded by the residue of their making and by displaying the detritus of the work's construction, the artists draw attention to its performative nature.
Woodcraft Folk
Motherf**king Nature (Showroom, London, 2004), was the first point in which Juneau/Projects/ brought together their earlier process-led works with live performance and sculptural objects. More recently, Woodcraft Folk (2007) at f a projects, London, was 'an unlikely combination of the home-spun aesthetic of the Woodcraft Folk and the unbridled emotional content of emo punk rock (as in emotionally hardcore)'.4 The exhibition drew from the artists' own experiences of The Woodcraft Folk, a youth organisation founded in 1925 as an alternative to the militaristic overtones of the Scouting movement. Woodcraft Folk explored ideas of tradition, evolution, consumerism, youth and amateurism in popular culture, and showcased a new body of work, 'Emotional Modernism' (2007), a series of computer generated simulated wood carvings that depict portraits of teenage emo bands. Originating in Washington DC in the mid-eighties, emocore is a sub-genre of hardcore punk in which bands impulsively express strong emotions during gigs. Drawing on emo fan memorabilia exchanged through networking technologies, 'Emotional Modernism' references the importance of symbols and codes as tools of both identification and exclusion in social groups.
The Black Moss
Juneau/Projects/
I'm going to antler you, 2006
Their most recent project, The Black Moss, originated at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2006 and has toured to Wysing Arts Centre in Bourn, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, FACT in Liverpool and is soon to arrive at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, where they will create new work. Adapting its shape and content to each venue and audience, The Black Moss comprises two discrete entities: 'I'm going to antler you' (2006) and 'Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space' (2006).
The former is a project resulting from Juneau/Projects/ working with two groups of young people to form two fictitious, rival bands, The Ebony Angels and The Embers. Each band formed their own collective identity with combinations of various individual characters, creating logos, CD covers and contributing to the writing, recording and production of songs. 'I'm going to antler you' presented costumes and photographs alongside musical equipment - a drum kit, guitars and amps hand painted with picturesque landscapes and adorned with animal skin rugs - emanating the sound of backing tracks written by Juneau/Projects/ and lyrics performed by the children, triggered by the presence of the audience.
The piece was born out of the exhibition Romantic Detachment at PS1, New York in 2004 when their plan to collaborate with US rock band Flaming Fire failed to materialise. Based on the idea of recreating an event that never happened 'I'm Going to Antler You' suggests what this collaboration may have involved.
Juneau/Projects/
Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space, 2006
'Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space' is a text-based computer game presented on interactive, customised work-stations set amidst a mock landscape featuring plants, paintings and mini forests built into the wall.
Navigating through various levels, the user is guided through a complex fictional narrative involving journeys through a series of interlocking environments, gradually moving from countryside to city, encountering fictional characters and places in Birmingham, Cambridge, Silo and Liverpool, added as the work has travelled through the exhibition tour. Users can also opt to listen to the texts via the computerised speech of the Windows software reader - a conflation of the 'natural' and the manmade.5
Within this gaming format, users encounter network points in the floorboards that make up the theatrical spatial markings and during their journey are invited to collect computer parts - a wooden keyboard, a 'mouse' made of fur and bones - fashioned from natural elements. 'Haunted by a distant 'pinging' in the sky, we are presented with opportunities to connect, to attain a perfect resolution by achieving the implied utopian impulse - a world where nature is at one with the man-made'.6
Biography
Their first solo exhibition, Motherf**king Nature took place at the Showroom, London in 2004, followed by exhibitions at f a projects, London - Driving off the Spleen (2004) and Woodcraft Folk (2007) - as well as developing a longstanding relationship with Grizedale Arts, Cumbria, leading to projects in the UK, USA and Japan. Other exhibitions include Romantic Detachment (PS1, New York, 2004, with Grizedale Arts), Heart of an Owl (Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 2005), British Art Show 6 (Hayward Gallery and tour, 2005-6), Seven Samurai (Grizedale Arts, Japan, 2006) and You Awake in a Forest [performance] (Grizedale Arts and A Foundation Programme, Liverpool Biennial, 2006).
The Black Moss opens at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea on 5 April, and other upcoming projects include Extreme Craft, opening on 25 May at CAC, The Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. From 23 May - 2 June, Vivid, Birmingham, will present Juneau/Projects/'s new interactive video game. As yet untitled, it is a rock and roll game about an owl controlled by a band set up of guitar, bass and drums.
Juneau/Projects/ are represented by f a projects, London.
References/links
1. Juneau/Projects/ The Black Moss, Wysing Arts, Cambridge, 2006
2. Nigel Prince, 'One day that pinging sound in the sky will end', Juneau Projects - The Black Moss, Ikon Gallery, Birgmingham/Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, 2006, p. 12
3. Adam Jasper, 'Rocking the Block: Woodcraft Folk', Art Review, Issue 8, February 2007
4. Nigel Prince, 2006
5. Ibid.
www.juneaurecords.co.uk
www.faprojects.com
www.creative-egremont.org
www.grizedale.org
www.vivid.org.uk
April 2007
Further texts
Sally O'Reilly, Review of Woodcraft Folk, Spike, no. 11, 2007
Further information
Karen MacKinnon - nomination textI would like to nominate Ben Sadler and Philip Duckworth aka Juneau/Projects/ specifically for their recent exhibition The Black Moss at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. I find their work is... read on
