Last Saturday I was in a delightful gallery/screening/talks/discussion café called the 100 Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, Hoxton, East London. Its atmosphere is convivial, there’s intriguing art on the walls: halved violins and various invented instruments, then more recently, computer animated art on screens, which downstairs in the basement develops into light sculptures, and an installation with light pulsing down wires in all directions, and images on a screen which can be controlled by a console and a keyboard. Upstairs in the café you can see someone taking a book from a display and sitting with it in one of the sofas there to read it, in this case The Quadrivium. The books which are lying around relate to the art on display at the time, an excellent stimulating idea. In fact you probably won’t leave this unique gallery without having had an interesting discussion, a read, or an encounter with a film, or improvised music, or poets performing their work, or if you stay long enough, all of these.
More below:
The River That Walks was shown there earlier this year, and was shown again last Saturday, preceded by Oserake, courtesy of Graham MacKeachan and Montse Gallego. It was shown on the biggest screen it’s ever been projected on, as part of a programme curated by Simon McLennan, along with a varied selection of films which featured choreography, various audiovisual techniques, and flute music, Japanese and European. Chris H. Lynn’s People’s Park Reverie, with its rhythms of summer in a Shanghai public park, and its musical colours, also worked really well on the huge screen – you felt you were right there looking at the green sunlight through the swaying giant lotus leaves on the lake. Details of the film programme, The Zone, evocative pics of the 100 Years Gallery are on www.thezonebrighton.blogspot.com
The River That Walks also was shown in January, at Baxter’s Gallery in Cowcross Street, London, as part of the Landscape and Arts Network’s annual symposium, with a splendid lady who struck a lithophone if anyone exceeded their 15-minute presentation: it’s more civilised than striking the speaker with the beater.