* GREEN LOVE / BOTANY & RHETORIC *
> nils norman, lincoln tobier, simon leung & luke stoneham >
Double Feature Cinema is a project which consists of two alternately projected videos using one screening apparatus. The two works, Green Love and Botany and Rhetoric, share similar concerns about the intersection between the "natural" and "social" as they manifest in scenarios set in Los Angeles.
*
GREEN LOVE * > nils norman and lincoln tobier
>
Two supermarket workers caught up in the political fervour of the "Super
Market Strikes", decide to take things futher. Radicalised at the picket
line they begin to implement a series of break-away actions, using radical urban
guerilla farming techniques they conspire to redesign their immediate landscape
destroying parking lots, monkey wrenching cars, reclaiming surplus spaces, replanting
parks, freeway ramps and median strips. This mad spree of micro-landscape design
reaches its terrible climax with a stand-off with the police and the ultimate
deaths of our heroes. Green Love will be the first collaboration between London
based artist Nils Norman and Los Angeles based artist Lincoln Tobier.
* BOTANY & RHETORIC * > simon leung and luke stoneham >
Botany and Rhetoric is conceived as a video overture for an opera Leung has worked on since 1998. The last act of the work, Proposal for The Side of the Mountain (an opera by Leung and composer Michael Webster), was presented as an opera/film/sculpture at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2002. Botany and Rhetoric will be a collaboration between Leung and Manchester-based composer Luke Stoneham.
This short video is conceived as a meditation on the eco/geography of Los Angeles--its vegetation, landscape, etc--as they lend themselves to a thinking of the conditions and qualities of social life. The images are built around the dynamics between the native plants of the area, and the introduced vegetation since the side of the mountain was turned into a park in a city called "Los Angeles." The ecological facts of Los Angeles (site of fire, earthquakes, landslidesSą) and the way in which "civilization" is built on a desert landscape made possible by freeways and imported water will be explored. Elements in "the natural world" (vegetation, land, weatherSą) will serve as metaphors for categorical concepts such as the "native" and the "foreign." Native and introduced plants are conceived as interpolating "archives" which, like the people who come upon them, "sing" their imaginary past and future.
> bios >
For the past decade nils norman has been devising a series of imaginative proposals for improving urban living conditions through community-based initiatives. He is no starry-eyed utopian, however... Norman has struck a careful balance between parodying visionary zeal and maintaining faith in alternative solutions to contemporary civic malaise.
lincoln
tobier is an artist based in Los Angeles. Using sculpture, photography, painting,
video and radio, his work is an exploration of the public sphere, the erosion
of forms for exchange and debate, and the structural and legal encroachment
on speech.
His exhibition La Machine is on view at Daniel Hug Gallery in Los Angeles from
March 26 through April 24.
simon leung’s work in various media is project-based. Such projects include: a reposing of Duchamp’s oeuvre as an discourse in ethics; rethinking the psycho/philosophic/political dimensions of AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; and meditations on “the residual space of the Vietnam War,” comprising of projects on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing. His last project was an opera/film/sculpture titled "Proposal for The Side of the Mountain."
Luke Stoneham is a composer living in Manchester, England. He is currently developing LOST IN MUSIC ('Words hard and lovely as diamonds' - Dom Sylvester Houédard) in collaboration with writer/director/performer Rose English (TANTAMOUNT ESPERANCE, WALKS ON WATER); and INVISIBLE DANCES ('There are only questions at the threshold of the metaphysics of the night' - Gaston Bachelard) with choreographer/performer Frank Bock and director/designer Simon Vincenzi. He is taking his new work, ALTAWHID, to the Regello Festival, Tuscany, in July. Stoneham recently recorded with new music groups Exposé and Rout.
special thanks to the british council for their support in the presentation the work of nils norman.