Elizabeth McAlpine
Works on Paper
26 October20 November 2010

Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to announce Works on Paper a solo exhibition by Elizabeth McAlpine.

The exhibition consists of a performance titled Words & Music (Headlines), which was first enacted at the Barbican as part of the Surreal House exhibition this summer. Words & Music attempts to re-imagine the written word through sound, using an upright piano and five piano players playing simultaneously. Using the headlines of today from the major newspapers, McAlpine has created a score assigning a key to each letter or punctuation point. The words from the headlines are then played as a chord. The resulting sounds reflect the randomness of everyday life, but patterns emerge that portray the pace and tone of the news of the day. Words & Music is an experiment in an acoustic representation of the current moment.

The performance will be reenacted on two other occasions during the course of the exhibition both each to very different acoustic effect.

In conjunction with the series of performances, new works titled News Lines are drawings on newsprint paper made by colour carbon paper traces. Single colour lines trace the image of frames found in the front page news stories of the day.

With special thanks to the following performers:

Edward Watkins, Joseph Houston, Clíodna Shanahan, Andrew Charity and Steven Wilmot.

 

Our thanks also to Anna Ursinus, Ben Hunter and Matthew Wilkinson