Synopses & Reviews
In the 1980s, London-based Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, born in 1958, worked as an assistant to filmmaker Derek Jarman, soon gaining a reputation for his own experimental shorts and his collaborations with the dancer Michael Clark. Since the 1990s, Wyn Evans has also been creating installations, often inspired by cinema history or literature, that incorporate elements like philosophical texts, mirrors, neon lights, fireworks, plants and Morse code to form a constellation of meanings that unravel into myriad poetic associations. Evans' desire to animate knowledge and reconceive the materials of the past make him analogous to Marcel Broodthaers, his erstwhile mentor Derek Jarman or even William Blake. This publication includes essays that delve into the artist's use of language and his experiments with time and perception. On the subject of Evans' purposeful inscrutability, critic Jens Asthoff has written, Evans wants to go beyond that which we describe as understanding, to reach the untranslatable elements hidden in all experience. 'I hate the idea of being accessible,' he says. This volume includes nearly 200 images of the artist's installations, films, wall texts and sound works.
Synopsis
Foreword by Helmut Friedel, Susanne Page. Text by Molly Nesbitt, Susanne Gaensheimer.
Synopsis
In Which Something Happens All Over Again For The Very First Time is the first comprehensive publication to deal with the sculptural installations, film projections, neon texts and sound productions of the Welsh artist, Cerith Wyn Evans. Evans began as an assistant to the American underground filmmaker Derek Jarman, concentrating on his own short experimental films throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s he began to produce installations that explored the phenomenology of language, time and perception. In recent years, he has expanded his arsenal of materials to include fireworks, neon, texts, film, photography and sculpture. Of his work shown at Tate Modern's 2006 Triennial, the Tate described his work: Cerith Wyn Evans approaches knowledge like a magpie, borrowing from authors of the past to invigorate the viewer's perceptions of the present. Though comprising few elements, his work is decadent and intense, both with its use of references as well as in its magical and dramatic effect.