Artist Performance Film Screenings
Join us at The New Art Gallery Walsall, prior to the West Midlands Open preview, for performance film screenings by WMO artists Paul Newman and Nita Newman, and Alex Billingham in the Floor 4 Conference Room.
Following the film screenings there will be a Q&A with the artists and an opportunity to explore the Twenty Twenty Collection works in the Community Gallery.
Free, drop in, All welcome.
The Rehearsal of Frankenstein by Paul Newman and Nita Newman was broadcast directly from the artists’ own living room during lockdown in 2020 via Instagram Live, as part of the Stryx Gallery Online Artist Residency Programme. This is the first public screening of the live recording. The performance features the Reanimation of the Bride by the Monster and the ritual of bandaging the bride, who in turn bandages the monster, then intertwining each other. The performance ends with a freeze frame referencing ‘The Lovers’ a series of paintings by Magritte. The monster reclaims his right to have the potential of a ‘happy ending’. The performance explores nonverbal communication, mime, absurdity, the use of props and references to painting. Masked characters have fed into Paul Newman’s own paintings and his work Mr Clean (an evolution of a Frankenstein-like character) features in the Twenty Twenty Collection.
Glistening SCUM by Alex Billingham was also a performance filmed during lockdown, which was commissioned by SHOUT for their digital festival. The work is part of a series which reflected on the failed presidency of Donald J Trump. It was based on an original 3 hour performance for Vivid Project’s Black Hole Club in 2017, where the artist sat in a bath of glitter inviting the audience to give them ‘golden showers’ referencing the suggested links between Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Good Riddance, the final artwork in the series made when Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, was acquired for our Twenty Twenty Collection and references visual elements from the filming process to celebrate the end of his presidency in the visual form of an Instagram post on brushed aluminium (a substance once considered the most valuable on earth, but now regarded as throwaway.)
