Alex Hartley (1963 — ) Alex Hartley

Alex Hartley (1963 — )

Alex Hartley is a UK based artist whose work explores our understanding of utopian ideologies. His early work focused on the white cube of the gallery space; testing the parameters of art’s containers. This has expanded to explore iconic modernist architectural forms, as the work considers buildings as social experiments manifested in both the built and natural environments.

Untitled (1993)

Untitled (1993)

In The Future No One Will Live In Cities (2005)

Deep In The Woods We’re Undiscovered (2005)

We threw it all away Throw it all away Rolling every way It’s irresponsible So civilized I guess you wonder where you are Nature boy, nature man, take me along Deep in the woods we’re undiscovered Talking Heads — Totally Nude (1988)

The interventions are all scaled architectural models which come together to allude to the creation of something that has now become uninhabitable, a building or form of shelter occupying an uninhabited landscape. In some of the images, Hartley even digs crevices into the flat surface of the photograph.

Imagine There Is A God (2011)

Imagine there is a God (2011). ‘I’m not a very good photographer, I have to do something else, make some kind of intervention. But I live with the photograph, which is a static thing, day after day at first. That’s when I build a past into it, create a narrative for it, and that’s what excites me. But just making a nice new house wouldn’t really take me anywhere and so the original scene seems to deteriorate almost in front of me. I can’t help it’

It Was Madness to think they’d never find us (2005)

There was a factory Now there are mountains and rivers You got it, you got it We caught a rattlesnake Now we got something for dinner We got it, we got it There was a shopping mall Now it’s all covered with flowers You’ve got it, you’ve got it If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower You’ve got it, you’ve got it Nothing but Flowers (1988)

(2003)

In LA Climbs Alternative Uses for Architecture climbs are photographed, named, graded, and appear alongside topographic diagrams and detailed route descriptions. Crossing over from artistic intervention to a guidebook for the climber bored with legitimate locations, Hartley’s project has similarities to the exploits of the legendary Frenchman Alain Robert (who famously scaled the Petronas Towers, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building) or skatebording culture where empty swimming pools are used as alternative sites for extreme skating.

(2009)

These acts of architectural misinterpretation encompass an eclectic selection including Hartley’s climb up the infamous Hollywood sign, Frank Gehry’s New Disney Hall, as well as classic mid-century Case Study Houses and iconic works by architects such as Wright, Schindler, Meler, Koenig, Lautner and Neutra.

These exploits come together to reveal a perception of the city and its architecture reduced to surface, texture and relative distance from the ground. Through a combination of colour photography, drawings and diagrams, this book provides an alternative view of key sites and buildings in and around Los Angeles.

Eames and VDL II (2003)

Dropper (2011)

Dropper is a recreation of a «Drop City» dome. For a brief five-year period in the mid 60’s, Drop City was an artist’s community in Colorado that became a symbol of the hippy movement. The community disintegrated and broke apart amid tensions exacerbated by the ‘no rules’ policy. Fabricated from the roofs and bonnets of cars, Hartley lived in Dropper during its two months at the Victoria Miro Gallery, and at various other locations. Dropper was donated to the Occupy movement in 2011, but in parallel to the breakup of Drop City , it contributed to the collapse of the camp by creating a hierarchy amongst the tented dwellings.

Since 2003 Cape Farewell has led eight expeditions to the Arctic, two to the Scottish Islands, and one to the Peruvian Andes, including two youth expeditions, taking creatives, scientists, educators and communicators to experience the effects of climate change first hand.

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, Stranded , 2005 -2006 (process)

Ackroyd & Harvey have been collaborating and exhibiting internationally together in galleries, museums and found sites since 1990. Sculpture, photography, science, architecture and ecology are some of the disciplines that intersect in their work, resulting in time-based acts that reveal an intrinsic bias towards process and event.

Rachel Whiteread, Embankment (2005)

Around the time Whiteread began to work on this project she was preoccupied by the final scene of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), in which the fabled Ark of the Covenant is stored away. After being gently lowered into a crate and the top nailed down, it is wheeled off on a trolley. As the camera pans away we see that when it takes its place it will be just one in a gargantuan warehouse full of crates filled with heaven knows what. Whiteread has spoken of wanting to make the Turbine Hall into a kind of warehouse, and this is an intriguing response to a space which was once industrial but is now a museum. For what is a museum, after all, but a storage depot for art?

Citizen Cain (1941)

David Buckland: The Great White Sale (2007) These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cynthia Hopkins Performance and Music Artist Internationally acclaimed musical performance artist Cynthia Hopkins from Brooklyn, NY writes and sings songs, records albums, and creates groundbreaking multi-media performance works that incorporate music, text, video and theatrical design to create imaginative stories that intertwine truth and fiction, blurring the lines between edification and entertainment.

Deep longing, across the universe: Cynthia Hopkins in “The Success of Failure (or, the Failure of Success), ” which mixes high-tech gadgetry with whimsy and despair at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Alex Hartley. Nymark (Undiscovered Island), 2006, (detail)

Nymark: Undiscovered Island (2006)

http: //nowhereisland. org

The work involved the discovery of a new island that had been revealed from within the melting ice of a retreating glacier on the Svalbard peninsula in Norway. The island was taken out into International Waters by an expedition team, where it was declared a new nation. This new nation – Nowhereisland was towed around the South West coast of England prior to and during the 2012 Olympic Games.

In a military installation in Toronto a fixed camera records Hartley in real time over a two and a half hour period as his core body temperature drops below 35 deg C and becomes hypothermic. Hypothermia is a medical emergency that occurs when your body loses heat faster than it can produce heat, causing a dangerously low body temperature. Normal body temperature is around 98. 6 F (37 C).

http: //www. alexhartley. net/hypothermia

Vigil (2014)

For his project Vigil, Hartley will use state of the art climbing technology to make a lookout point suspended from the highest point of the hotel. This climber’s camp will be inhabited for the duration of the Triennial, by the artist and by volunteers, all of whom will keep a log of what they observe. This act of vigil has resonance both with the recent Occupy movement and with the ancient tradition of hermits retreating from the world to a high place in order to fulfil their functions as a ‘seer’ better (St. Simeon Stylites among others).

A precarious encampment was built on the outside a 13 th floor window of the iconic Grand Burstin Hotel overlooking the town, harbour and the channel across to France. A single occupant maintains a watch over everything seen below for the nine week duration of the exhibition. A parasitic building quoting a ship’s crow’s nest and the 1970’s rooftop protests of Strangeways prison and Greenpeace actions. An hourly log of visible events was kept. http: // vigil. org. uk

Alex Hartley , A Gentle Collapsing II, (2016) within Victoria Miro gallery.

‘I wanted the installation to have a timeless quality – It could be a modernist ruin, or a Victorian folly. ’

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are possibly the best known among those artists who work outside of the gallery in urban and rural environments. Many of their projects involve wrapping stuff in fabric – be it the Reichstag in Berlin, the Kunsthalle in Bern, a medieval tower in Spoleto, etc. Their latest project titled “Over The River” is a plan to suspend 5. 9 miles of silvery fabric over the Arkansas River in Colorado. Nearing launch, the project has been thrown into some disarray by a the filing of a lawsuit to stop the project. A group named “Rags Over Arkansas River” (ROAR) claim that the project will cause significant environmental damage and that the Environmental Impact Assessment of the proposed project was flawed.

“ The artists bring to Over The River a documented and unwavering commitment to conservation and are dedicated to avoiding or minimizing all potential impacts related to noise, vegetation, air quality and water quality during the construction and removal phases, as well as during the two-week viewing period. In fact, the artists altered their artistic design, installation schedule and the viewing period to be sensitive to wildlife and the environment. ”

Supporters will quote this as evidence of their commitment. Cynics will compare this statement to almost identical statements made by large corporations involved in mining, drilling and other natural resource intensive industries. In January 2017, after pursuing Over The River, Project for the Arkansas River, State of Colorado for 20 years and going through five years of legal arguments, Christo decided to no longer wait on the outcome and devote all of his energy, time and resources into the realization of The Mastaba, Project for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Nymark: Undiscovered Island (2006)

Drawing Sculpture Photography Performance Collage/Construction Land Art? Inerventions Multi-media Issue driven