TOKU CHAN LIKES TO LOOK UP, the exhibition of works by Brighton artist Lee Baker, organised by Metal, opened at Coexist Gallery @ TAP last night. See the images and video, and leave your comments about the show…

Toku Chan is an anime character invented by Lee Baker, who was inspired by his trips to Japan and especially his visit to the Kite Museum. The resulting exhibition includes a short animation, a large cuddly sculture representing Toku Chan, prints which draw on influences from traditional Japanese art with an anime twist, and an installation of amazing kites in the Winch room.

For more information about the exhibition - see the previous post on IDEA13 HERE or visit Lee Baker’s WEBSITE.

TOKU CHAN LIKES TO LOOK UP runs from 10 - 26 March at Coexist Gallery, TAP, Old Essex & Suffolk Water Building, North Road, Southend on Sea SS0 7AB

The youngest Southend artists showed their work at the Schools Show Art Exhibition at the Library.

The annual exhibition included art projects from Southend pupils aged 5-17. The Mayor, Councillor Brian Smiths, presented awards to the winners.

Thorpe Greenways Infant School has scooped the overall prize -Best Exhibit in the Show - with their Renoir-inspired project.

RENOIR PROJECT:

Open Studio art workshop on the first and last Thursday of each month. Professional artist Hashim Akib runs themed art workshops from his studio in Southend.

Open studio workshop on the first and last Thursday of each month, from 10.00am - 3.00pm. Stay for the whole day or a minimum of two hours. Try your hand at portraits, landscapes, still life in a variety of mediums. Each workshop is limited to nine students with short demonstrations and one to one sessions.

Whether you are an absolute beginner or experienced amateur the workshops are designed to suit your individual needs.   Private or small group tuition available on request

Pre-booking is essential, call Hash on tel 01702 329408, mob 07958 486634.

Themes for 2010:

25th Mar and 1st Apr, Figure’s from Photos
29th Apr and 6th May, Reflections
27th May and 3rd Jun, Weather
24th Jun and 1st Jul, Gardens
29th Jul and 5th Aug, Landscapes
26th Aug and 2nd Sep, Townscapes
30th Sep and 7th Oct, Model
28th Oct and 4th Nov, Nightscapes
25th Nov and 2nd Dec, Winterscapes
 
Cost:

£5 per hour, minimum of 2 hours / £6 per hour for model session
£25 for the whole day, 10.00 am - 3.00pm

Open Studio, Southend On Sea
Open Studios / Behind 147-149 South Avenue, Southend on Sea, SS2 4HX

OPEN STUDIO website

Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs ), a project by Southend-based media artists, Harwood and Yokokoji, will appear at AV Festival on 12-14th March.

A one-hundred year old, 35-ton showman’s steam engine powers a computer with 1.5 tons of coal. Black lungs inflate every time a database record of miners’ lung disease is shown on the computer monitors. It feels like you’ve been invited into a fun fair, but one where the rides log their own accidents – a fun fair run by people who long ago became indistinct from the machines they maintain.

Over three days at the Discovery Museum, with groups of miner activists, Coal Fired Computers articulates relations between Power, Art and Media. A new work by leading UK media artists, Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa), in collaboration with Jean Demars, it responds to the displacement of coal production to distant lands like India and China after the UK miners’ strike in 1984/85.

Coal Fired Computers reflects on the complexities of our global fossil fuel reliance and especially on how coal transforms our health as we have transformed it. Today coal produces 42% of the world’s electricity, and in many countries this rate is much higher (more than 70% in India and China). This power is produced by descendants of Charles Parson’s 1884 steam turbines, also on display in the Discovery Museum.

It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them, displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap and apparently clean goods we consume.

Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81% of the energy used in a computer’s life cycle is expended in the manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons of coal dust into unknown lungs.

Coal Fired Computers brings together these disparate elements into an artwork, allowing us to reflect on the complexities that have created and maintained power, the crisis of fuelling that power and its subsequent health residues.

AV FESTIVAL website.

Coal Fired Computers  is commissioned by AV Festival 10 and produced in partnership with Discovery Museum. Supported by Metal Culture, Isis Arts and The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Palace Writers Project is open to anyone over the age of 16 with an interest and enthusiasm for writing. You do not have to have any past experience in writing. The project will be lead by writer Roy Apps (website). Roy started his career writing jokes, songs and sketches for comedians such as David Jason and Lenny Henry. He has written for many TV shows including over 10 years with Byker Grove. He has been visiting writer at the National Gallery and also received a BAFTA for his work on children’s television. Roy also writes musicals for schools.

The group will meet at the Palace Theatre on a Wednesday evening at 7.30pm, starting on Wednesday 21 April. It will cost £10 a month to be a member and after three months we intend to hold a festival where the public can enjoy the groups work.

To find out more or to book your place on this exciting project please contact Emily on 01702 390472 or emilym AT southendtheatres.org.uk.

Supported by Southend on Seas Legacy 2012

The Palace Theatre / 430 London Road, Southend, Essex, SS0 9LA

Curator Charlie Levine and artist Hayley Lock invited friends and acquaintances from the social network facebook to take part in a Christmas card/collage exchange at TROVE, Birmingham in January of this year. Their show POST is traveling to The Coexist Gallery @ TAP in April and you can take part too… Charlie Levine and Hayley Lock hope to accumulate new artists and new collage works responding to the idea of POST as the show moves around the country. POST includes works by national and international contemporary artists which were created and then posted through the physical, and therefore traditional route of the postal service in the UK.

Artists include:
Darren Banks, Liz Bradshaw, Martyn Cross, Vicky Cull, Tracey Eastham, Rebecca Foster, Anna Francis, Anneka French, Helen Grundy, Lulu Horsfield, David Kefford, Hayley Lock, Renauld Loda, MAMA, David Miller, Malcolm Moseley, Justine Moss, John Rixon, Sarah Sparkes, Emily Speed, Ana Benlloch and Stuart Tait, Cathy Wade, Edward Wakefield, Lucy Wilson, Jennifer Zoellner

If you are interested - and for more information - please check out the links below and send your  submissions by POST to: CoExist @ TAP, (The Old Water Works) North Rd, SS0 7AB

Link to FACEBOOK PAGE.

The curators will choose the work they wish to include in the exhibition when ‘hanging’ the show…

The Southend’s Steampunk Society is meeting for the first time at the Railway Hotel this Thursday.

An informal event bringing together fans of the steampunk movement. Come to share your ideas or just for a chat.

What is Steampunk? WIKI definition: Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction and speculative fiction, frequently featuring elements of fantasy, that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used — usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era England — but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual artisans into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical “steampunk” style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk.

Also check out the current STEAMPUNK show at the Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science - LINK.

Starts at 8pm / Optional dress code: steampunk

The Railway Hotel /

Clive Cowan opens for the melodic Prog-Rock / Folk-Rock band Breathing Space at Riga Music Bar.

Cowan’s solo set will be of about an hour long and will include almost exclusively his own compositions. He will start off with “electro-acoustic guitar songs of varying styles and genres but all from my roots in folk-rock and, unusually (due to the nature of the gig), ending with three electric rock songs (again my own) played against a drum sequencer which I programmed (in other words guitar and drums).”

Clive Cowan - on MySpace.

See the video of Breathing Space’s Questioning Eyes which has won the Classic Rock Society Award for Best Track for 2009:

Breathing Space WEBSITE.

Starts at 8.30pm / Book in advance for only £8.00 otherwise £10.00 on the door. BOOK HERE

Riga Music Bar / Adjacent to The Cricketers Inn / 228 London Road / Westcliff-on-Sea /
Tel: +44 (0)1702-348020

This is an extract from an interview that took place at Metal, Chalkwell Hall. Simon Poulter talks to Wilco Johnson, among other things, about Oil City Confidential film.
“I never meant to do this…I wanted to be a painter I think”, says Wilko. We are sitting on the top floor of Chalkwell Hall looking out over the Thames Estuary in Southend and I am immediately struck by Wilko’s sense of humour and candour. “Dr Feelgood was really a local band…we started the band to play that kind of music cos we liked it and nobody had any idea of doing it professionally or anything like that.” By October 1976 the four Canvey Islanders had reached number one in the UK charts with their live album ‘Stupidity’.

With the release of Julien Temple’s film ‘Oil City Confidential’ there has been a renewed interest in Dr Feelgood and particularly Wilko. Of Temple’s Seventies rockumentary trilogy, this is by far the most interesting work, as it portrays the way in which the band literally grafted their way to the top through a combination of stripped down songs and amazing stage presence. Dr Feelgood rehearsed their menacing stagecraft in pubs and clubs around the Thames Estuary and as Wilko says: “Violence is the wrong word..but there was a certain violence about it…people liked it and it attracted their attention and of course you do it more.”

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW ON METAL’S WEBSITE HERE.

The films at teh Railway Hotel are now screened on Mondays at 7.30pm. Next week, it’s a classic 1976 American horror movie Carrie.
Directed by Brian De Palma, Carrie is based on the novel by Stephen King. It tells a story of a socially outcast teenage girl, Carrie White, who discovers she possesses psionic power which seems to flare up when she becomes angry. Carrie’s powers become apparent after her humiliation by her peers, teachers, and abusive mother, eventually resulting in tragedy. The film stars Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Betty Buckley, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, William Katt, John Travolta, and Priscilla Pointer.

The original trailer:

Starts at 7.30pm / Free entry

The Railway Hotel / Clifftown Road, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, SS1 1AJ T: 01702 343194