Silo
Chris Woodvine (UK)

November 20, 2020 - January 10, 2021 in The Demo Room at Galleri Image


Silo gives a disorienting view of the clay pits found throughout the West Midlands, a region of England that is renowned for pottery and ceramics. A silent, looping video shows drone footage from a local quarry. The drone hovers above the clay pit, sometimes rotating in place, other times flying across the landscape, or zooming towards the ground below. From above one can clearly see traces of industrialization - lines, shadows, and contours carved into the landscape by the quarry’s machinery.

Artist Chris Woodvine (UK) further disrupts the landscape with layers of geometric shapes and patterns that move across the video screen, partially obstructing the scene below. These shapes, which resemble corporate logos, contain additional drone footage of the quarry. They act as windows into other views of the landscape, offering glimpses of red earth and gray stone. They also echo industrial processes of refining, compressing, and synthesizing natural materials. Woodvine is interested in how such materials are circulated, organized, and stored - an idea that for him is emblematized by the silo.

About the artist
Chris Woodvine’s multimedia practice centres on his interest in the power and mechanics of language. He uses readymade objects, video, drawing, painting, sound, and writing to investigate language from a multisensory perspective, often translating words into images. Through this process Woodvine seeks to better understand the subversive potential of linguistic failures - for example how glitches, slippages, and overlaps can undermine the authority of hegemonic language by breaking down its meaning.

Currently based in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Woodvine was educated at Sheffield Hallam University and Newcastle-Under-Lyme College. Silo is his first solo, international exhibition.

Call & Response
Silo is the third exhibition in Call & Response, an experimental project that activates two window galleries (The Demo Room in Aarhus, Denmark and AirSpace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, UK) as sites for collaborative exhibition-making. Call & Response is structured as a back-and-forth exhibition series, where one exhibition is made in direct response to another. It challenges four Danish and four British artists to create exhibitions involving a degree of improvisation and reciprocity.

Danish artist Lise Haurum will respond to Silo with a solo exhibition of her work in The Demo Room in early 2021. Woodvine and Haurum will then continue their visual dialogue with a duo exhibition in the window venue at AirSpace Gallery.

Call & Response is curated by Pamela Grombacher, in collaboration with AirSpace Gallery and Galleri Image. The project is supported by the Danish Art Foundation, the City of Aarhus (Kulturudviklingspuljen), Arts Council England, and Stoke-on-Trent City Council.


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