City News

There are four intriguing exhibitions taking place at mac this spring, each giving its own interpretation of notions of space and time:
- Vacant Space by Janek Schaefer
- Silent Monuments by Maggy Milner and Colin Wilson
- No.06030052 / Severn Estuary by David Knowles
- Anew commission from Jonathan Shaw

Vacant Space by Janek Schaefer in collaboration with Chris Watson & David Tinapple invites you to experience the world in one small room.
 
Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if no one is there to hear it? Have you ever wondered what happens when you are not there?

Sound is constantly present, whether we are there or not. Using location recordings and panoramic photographs collected in a series of empty interiors around the world, Vacant Space reveals and celebrates their lives without us being present. On entering, the gallery appears silent. Images merge and scroll across the walls. Plugging headphones directly into the projection wall reveals a randomly shuffling soundtrack that influences the visuals in various ways, and creates endless new places. The installation explores the way sound travels through surfaces and around corners and deliberately embraces the context of the generic white gallery, by 'amplifying the void'.

Sound artist and Guinness Book of Records record-holder, Janek Schaefer's audio-visual installation will guide you on a constantly shifting tour of hundreds of merging panoramic perspectives and hours of captivating field recordings collected at locations all over the globe by award winning sound recording artist Chris Watson.
 
Commissioned by the Sonic Arts Network.

Silent Monuments is a joint show of work by individual photographers Maggy Milner and Colin Wilson, both of whom employ similar strategies to explore traditional notions of still life. They both create 'photographic tableaux' by placing significant domestic objects within interior spaces and are intrigued by the possibilities of story telling within the single photographic image. Their photographs create a tension, a sense of a moment poised between past and future, producing beautiful, enigmatic visual poetry.

Colin Wilson's monumental, silver gelatin prints are hand printed using traditional processes while Maggy Milner produces digitally manipulated images to offer unexpected muted colours and tones. 

There will be a special Illustrated Talk related to Silent Monuments: Artist and Programme Leader of the Photography degree course at University of Derby, Mark Durden and writer, Jane Fletcher will present an illuminating discussion on the photographs.

No.06030052 and Severn Estuary are the most recent work by artist David Knowles, on show in our public galleries. No.06030052 presents a sequence of 1440 photographic images, documenting a vacant advertising space over 24 hours. It is shown alongside imagery of the Severn Estuary.

Both projects are concerned with light, time and duration. Incorporating these elements, David reflects on the process of capturing the photographic image. We discover how light provides photographic information but, when the saturation point of light is reached, that same information disappears.

Both David's pursuit of imagery (which is void of information) and his choice of subject matter and screening contexts, commonly associated with advertising, make it clear that this series is an attempt to cleanse the medium of photography of associations with the industrial image.

Upon entering the car park to mac, you will notice a stunning photograph by Birmingham based artist Jonathan Shaw adorning the temporary hoardings. This piece of work has been commissioned by Calthorpe Estates during the development of the Edgbaston Mill project, in association with mac.
 
This panoramic image reveals traces of energetic human activity; the echo of an individual's movement, caught on the surface of the photograph. This is a space where time and motion have fused to create a new world. The image has captured dancers from the Birmingham Royal Ballet performing at the Birmingham Hippodrome but the ambiguity of their outline gives us an opportunity to explore a number of possible interpretations echoing similar activity showing at mac.