Marcus Coates, Blue Footed Booby, performance still from Human Report, a film for Channel 9 News, Santa Cruz, Galapagos, Ecuador (2008). Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery. Picture: Elke Hartmann
Exhibition: A Duck For Mr Darwin, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Level 3), Gateshead, April 10 – September 20 2009
The spirit of Charles Darwin arrives in Gateshead in a major five-month exhibition at the BALTIC featuring an impressive, multi-disciplinary cast of contemporary artists responding to the processes of evolutionary thinking and the theory of natural selection.
Tania Kovats continues to expand her infatuation with Darwin, this time nurturing Worm, a live habitat for the wriggly subjects of his final written work, working with “geological explicit landscapes”.
American Mark Dion’s installation provides a glimpse of some of the Victorian naturalists and tropical collectors of the 19th century, starring H W Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce’s adventures in exotic locations, studying laboratories in a recreation of their famous fellow explorer’s methods.
Mark Fairnington, Tally. Picture courtesy BALTIC
Dorothy Cross presents a film about the Galapagos Islands, where Marcus Coates also went, returning with footage of randy giant tortoises initiating mating rituals. Never shy of a fancy dress opportunity, Coates dresses up as a bird and reports on the current state of evolution for Galapagos TV in Human Report for Channel 9.
Sculptor Andrew Dodds is another exhibitor who made the pilgrimage to the Islands, taking in the wider social and cultural issues for new work considering “the contestations between evolutionary theory and creationism and its role within contemporary teachings”, and Charles Avery shapes a new island altogether in The Islanders, his imaginary, drawn and sculpted ecosystem.
Inspired by a childhood on the Scottish west coast outpost of Mull, Avery’s drawings include a bar and gambling spot on Onomatopoeia, one of the towns in the principality his mind evokes.
King in Exile (2008), taxidermy and mixed media in perspex on plinth. Courtesy of the artist and Doggerfisher, Edinburgh. Picture: Steve White
There’s a painting of a stud bull and the eyes of various wild animals by Mark Fairnington, a durational scientific workshop run by Ben Jeans Houghton and a hand-constructed wooden boat containing some of the miscellany Conrad Shawcross gathered during a trip along London’s River Lea last summer.
Part of his Pre-Retroscope V work, it complements a 360-degree panoramic film of the horizon, illustrating the futility of attempting to concisely imbibe our environment within any particular moment.
Mark Dion gives a talk as part of the exhibition on April 10 2009, 2pm-3pm. Admission is free but booking is essential. Call 0191 478 1810 or email events@balticmill.com
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Andrew Dodds, Paradise Lost (2002). Courtesy of the artist. Picture: Matt Minshull
Mark Dion, Department of Tropical Research, mixed media (2005). Courtesy in Situ fabienne leclerc, Paris. Picture: Marc Domage
Ben Jeans Houghton, Taxonomy of Transient Objects (May 2008). Durational installation
