A Secret Understanding artists

Graham Dolphin

Graham Dolphin's work appropriates objects and icons of the fashion and music industries, reforming them into assemblages that reveal the obsessions and formulas underwriting the temporal world of mass culture. To create his text works, he has hand–written every lyric from the Beatles' back catalogue over the iconic cover of the White Album, and transcribed every word from a single issue of Vogue onto one sheet of paper the same dimensions as the magazine. His drawings compile ‘every product’ as traced images of shoes, cosmetics, etc. overlaid on a single page. For his film works he has merged 1,500 images of Kate Moss into 60 seconds and presented footage of 100 Fashion Shows shown in a 100 seconds. These compulsive actions transform and disrupt the aspirations of popular culture and the glamour industry.

He has exhibited at Baltic, Gateshead, and commercial galleries in London. He has participated in group shows at venues including Barbican, Bloomberg Space, Five Years, Zwemmer and Seventeen Gallery (all London); Arnolfini, Bristol; MIMA, Middlesbrough; Southampton City Art Gallery; and at galleries across Europe and North America.

www.grahamdolphin.co.uk

Doug Fishbone

Doug Fishbone is an American artist living and working in London. He is perhaps best known for his project 30,000 Bananas – a huge mountain of ripe bananas installed in the middle of London's Trafalgar Square and later given away free to the audience – in 2004. Fishbone's video and performance work was included in the British Art Show 6, presented at venues across the UK in 2006. He had his first major solo project in 2006 Gimpel Fils and in 2007 performed at Hayward Gallery (both London).

He earned an MA in Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths College in 2003 and was awarded the Beck's Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004.

Nick Jordan

Nick Jordan is a Manchester–based artist whose practice encompasses video, drawing, painting, events and publishing. With references and motifs that include flytraps, ancient woodlands, weird Americana, modernist architecture and cinema, his work explores our complex relationship with the unruly natural world and our own multifaceted cultural histories.

Upcoming and recent exhibitions include Rub–a–dub–dub, Projektraum Exex, St.Gallen; North and South, Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland; Videonale 11, Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Asia–Europe Mediations, National Museum, Poznan; Godwottery, Transition Gallery, London.

Nick Jordan is currently undertaking an artist's fellowship at The Manchester Museum.

www.nickjordan.info

Clare Langan

Dublin–based artist and filmmaker Clare Langan creates compelling, eerily beautiful films that evoke strange, imaginative worlds. She films exceptional locations, manipulating the photographic process and format to create sensual, dreamlike works that reflect upon the fragility of mankind in the face of nature.

Her trilogy of films, Forty Below, 1999, Too Dark for Night, 2001, and Glass hour, 2002, were presented at MoMA, New York and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin in 2003; and at International 2002, Tate Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial. The trilogy toured to The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Miami Art Museum, ACMI Melbourne and Shanghai Youth Biennial in 2005; and to IMMA Dublin in 2004. The trilogy is in the collections of IMMA and the Tony Podesta Private Collection, Washington, among others. She participated in the Glen Dimplex Artists Award 2000.

Her most recent film Metamorphosis, 2007 won the Principle Prize at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany. Metamorphosis will be exhibited later this year in New York, Tokyo, Dublin, Lyon, Frankfurt and Barcelona.

www.clarelangan.com

Oliver Laric

Berlin–based media artist Oliver Laric uses a range of digital techniques to create witty, inventive artworks that subvert the logic and meaning of contemporary popular culture as well as celebrating its vibrancy. Widely viewed through the blogsphere and sites such as Myspace and YouTube, his works reinterpret music videos and web–available imagery, often using material sourced from these social networking and video sharing sites.

Recent animation works include an ongoing cycle of clip art figurines 787 Cliparts and Aircondition, a series of awkward dances steps frozen in time. His video pieces include 50 50, composed from fifty amateur webcam performances of songs by American rapper 50 Cent, and Message The, Laric's reworking of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's Old School Hip Hop classic.

www.oliverlaric.com

Torsten Lauschmann

Glasgow–based artist, filmmaker and live performer, Torsten Lauschmann celebrates glitches and out–takes, bits in between and images that might be easy to ignore. His work explores the mechanics of digital processes, software creation, experimental editing, approaches to performance, and the sculptural potential of video installation.

His solo shows and performances include: Transmission Gallery and Independent Studio (both Glasgow, 2004); and in 2002 the works Repetition/Nonsense 1997–2002, presented at Wackerfabrik, Darmstadt, and Pistolas Sexuales at Catalyst Gallery, Glasgow. His film and video work has been exhibited at galleries and festivals internationally including Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Belfast Film Festival; Frankfurt Art Fair; Gallery De March–Solbiati, Milan; Recontres Film Festival, France; Transmediale, Berlin; South London Gallery; De Appel, Amsterdam; CCA, Glasgow; Frieze Art Fair 2005.

In 2003, he was selected for the Scottish participation at the Venice Biennale. He received a BAFTA nomination for his video piece Remember Things Before They Happen, and in 2000, his work, 01game+01 application, was shortlisted for the Archibald Campbell and Harley Photography Prize.

www.lauschmann.com

Lia

Lia is an early pioneer of software art and internet art. Since 1995, her work has been concerned with the artistic possibilities of code, digital video, on–line methodology and user–specific application – seemingly different activities that she manages to bind together through her unique approach to creativity and production. In a painterly, conceptual manner, Lia creates live–performances, real time sceneries, projections and installations in public spaces, often working in collaboration with musicians.

Lia's works have been presented internationally in many festivals. She has received numerous awards and honors, among others a distinction from Ars Electronica Festival for re–move.org, and she has exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Over the last few years she has taught at the Fachhochschule Joanneum in Graz, Austria, the École Cantonalle d'Art de Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University for Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway. Lia lives and works primarily in Vienna.

www.strangethingshappen.org
www.at–c.org

Erik van Lieshout

Rotterdam–based artist, Erik van Lieshout made his name in the 1990s with his powerful drawings and paintings. Over recent years he has focused on films and installations, making poignant works that provide razor–sharp comments on socio–cultural reality and established values. His films present a dizzying game of political correctness and incorrectness, in which the protagonists are frequently social ‘outsiders’ – immigrants, mental health patients, political extremists – but the artist always casts himself in the leading role.

Recent solo exhibitions include a major survey show at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, which travels to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Following his American museum debut at the Hammer Museum, he had an exhibition at Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, in April 2007. Selected group exhibitions include Populism at the CAC Vilnius, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Ethnic Marketing at the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva. In addition, his work was featured in the Fourth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2006); the Gwangju Biennale (2006); and the Biennale of Sjarjah, Dubai (2004). In 2003 Van Lieshout presented a special installation and video for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His films have been screened at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and the Frieze Art Fair in London.

Jane and Louise Wilson

The work of Jane and Louise Wilson comprises video projections, photographs taken during the filming process, and three-dimensional sculptures. Underlying their work is an interest in issues of power, surveillance and paranoia. Their installations explore the psychology and architectural language surrounding certain buildings, as well as investigate sites of political power. Through their documentation of these often bureaucratic buildings, a silent narrative is formed, devoid of human content yet alluding to the ghostly presences of the people who once inhabited them.

Their work Stasi City, filmed in the former headquarters of the German Democratic Republic Intelligence Service and former Stasi prison, toured to Kunstverein Hanover, Kunstraum Munich, Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, and Kunstwerke, Berlin (1997), and to 303 Gallery, New York (1998). Solo exhibitions include: Serpentine Gallery, London (1999); Gamma, filmed at Greenham Common, the decommissioned American missile base in Berkshire, premiered at Lisson Gallery, London and toured to the Carnegie International (1999); Dreamtime, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2002); a solo show at 303 Gallery, New York and a billboard project, The New Brutalism II, Long Island City, NY (2004). They were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999.

Most recently Jane and Louise Wilson have designed the set for a new production of Michael Tippett's opera, The Knot Garden, a co-production between the Royal Opera House and Music Theatre, Wales.

Young–hae Chang Heavy Industries

Young–hae Chang Heavy Industries is Young–hae Chang (Korea), and Marc Voge (USA) creating text–based animations. Their simple, provocative slogans, manifestos and meditations have caught the attention of audiences worldwide. Instantly recognisable, their works present a stripped down visual aesthetic featuring the Monaco font and the exclusive use of black and white or a single colour. Alternative versions of works are presented in different languages and often combined with jazz soundtracks.

www.yhchang.com