Last Thursday I travelled up the M1 to the urban wonderment that is Milton Keynes. I was invited by my good friends the Ladies of the Press*, fresh from their Live Press! Tour, to feature as a guest artist at their live performance, Press Cuttings, held at Milton Keynes Gallery. Thursday nights at the Gallery are Scratch Nights organised by Simon Wright who invited Ana and Renée to perform their publishing prowess in conjunction with the current exhibition, Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown: Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery. The mixed media show is a collaboration between 2008 Turner Prize winner, Leckey, and Director of Cabinet Gallery, McGeown, who have sourced material from the Gallery's archives to create wall-based installations and new works that are inspired by the venue's ten year history. Working on the same principle, the Ladies of the Press* had access to the archives and chose to focus on press releases, private view information and correspondence between the Gallery and the art world for their performative publication. Taking a new direction from the much-loved zine format, a series of loose A4 press clippings hand picked by Ana and Renée were presented in a Manila folder to the Gallery's guests and participants. My contribution to the evening was to re-edit the press pack to produce a series of thirteen slides that were screened on a monitor to express a curious as well as personal take on the Milton Keynes Gallery archives that had been edited down and recontextualized through yet another stage to result in a multi-layered visual narrative that complemented the performance. Edited threads travelled back and forth between monitor, computer screen and press pack, resulting in a third and final stage of cuts that produced a series of individual press clippings that successfully documented both the Gallery's history and the evening's performance in unison. Below are the thirteen slides that were edited and magnified from the original press pack - visit Milton Keynes Gallery here for further information regarding the exhibition and click here for images of Leckey and McGeown's interpretations of the archive.
As always, a big thank you to Ana and Renée for inviting me to what was a fantastic evening and a special thank you to Simon who produced a monitor out of nowhere for my work and joined in the Tahoma tribute! Yes you've heard it here first: the return of the Tahoma typeface is back! Continuing in the spirit of the evening, a press release will follow shortly...
