Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program
Spring 2018
Thomson & Craighead
"Never Odd or Even"
Wednesday, February 7 at 6:30pm
Eliot Hall chapel
The lecture will be followed by a reception with the artists and is free and open to the public.
British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead will present a selection of their work made over the last twenty years as part of this spring's Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors in the Visual Arts series.
Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are artists living and working in London. They make artworks and installations for galleries and specific sites including online spaces. Much of their recent work looks at live networks like the web and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us. Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Thomson is Reader in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Craighead is a reader in contemporary art and visual culture at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University.
Thomson & Craighead work across video, sound, sculpture, installation and online space, using technology as a means to reformulate fundamental human questions for contemporary times. They have produced artworks that both exercise the dramatic conventions of cinema and examine the changing socio-political structures of the Information Age. In particular they look at how the digital world is ever more closely connected to the physical world, becoming a geographical layer in our collective sensorium. Time is often treated with a sculptor’s mentality, as a pliable quantity that can be moulded and remodelled. Solo shows include Wake me up when it’s over, Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Party Booby Trap, Carroll/Fletcher, London (2016); Maps DNA and Spam, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK (2014); and Not Even the Sky, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany (2013). Recent group exhibitions include Perpetual Uncertainty, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium (2017); Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); Big Bang Data, Somerset House, London, UK; Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands; How to Construct a Time Machine, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK (all 2015) and the Nam June Paik Award, Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (2014).
Image Credit:
Thomson & Craighead
Untitled (Balloon work), 2016
Video (3:19 min), printed balloons. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists. © 2018 Thomson & Craighead.