Melanie Jackson, A Global Positioning System, 2006, animation
Bristol's Arnolfini has been cooking up more and more interesting shows of late, and this pairing of upcoming British artist Melanie Jackson with the Austrian duo Lois and Franziska Weinberger should be no exception. If there's any thematic correspondence between the two artistic projects, then it would seem to be an insatiable drive to understand some of the underlying structures of the way we live: global flows of people and commodity production and circulation for Jackson, and the unstable equilibrium between the brute forces of nature and societal order and control for the Weinbergers.
Jackson has shown a number of times at Matt's Gallery in London, and a 2003 work originally shown there, Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World, will be re-presented in the Bristol show, 'Road Angel'. Some Things... comprises video footage of Hong Kong's migrant Filipino servant community, shown socializing on screens that are arranged amongst hand-made architectural models made of newspaper. 2005's Made in China video installation likewise employed visually arresting means - hand-drawn animation this time - to spin its tales of a Chinese musician in London and a factory worker in China. The major new animated work, A Global Positioning System (2006), also employs animation, ingeniously tracing the assembled parts of a GPS satellite positioning unit back to their individual places of manufacture, taking the viewer on a whirlwind tour that stretches from the rubber trees of Sri Lanka to the tin mines of Congo, and onwards to the production lines of China.
Lois and Franziska Weinberger, Home Voodoo 1, 2004, photograph
Lois and Franziska Weinberger, on the other hand, stay put. In gardens, mostly. Working across a variety of media, they take the 'perfectly provisional realm' of the garden as a metaphor for society, considered as an ever-changing organic entity that is tempered, controlled and generally kept within strict normative bounds. Clearly up on their Foucault, the Weinbergers single out the 'weed' as that element of society that manages to survive and adapt to inhospitable conditions, and which can point the way to imagined futures. The Arnolfini show, titled 'Home Voodoo', will feature a number of new commissions as well as existing works selected and re-presented especially for Bristol.
'Melanie Jackson: Road Angel'
9 December 2006 - 28 January 2007
'Lois and Franziska Weinberger: Home Voodoo'
9 December 2006 - 4 February 2007
Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol
BS1 4QA
Tel: 0117 917 2300
www.arnolfini.org.uk
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