Archived exhibition

Cooper Summer Residency 2011

COOPER SUMMER RESIDENCY 2011

6 - 29 July

Valentina Bonizzi, Sam Spreckley, Kim Walker

Cooper Summer Residency is a space for artists to reflect upon and experiment with new ideas and strategies that will extend their practice. The residency is based on a desire to investigate the means and potential of working in an environment that supports the exchange and sharing of resources and knowledge. It also provides audiences with an alternative way to observe, encounter and engage with contemporary art.

During the summer, the Cooper Gallery at DJCAD is turned into a studio space for a group of invited artists to develop new works in situ. For this year's residency, we are delighted to host three Video/Sound artists to take part in the programme: Sam Spreckley and Kim Walker are both DJCAD graduates who have exhibited works internationally, whilst Valentina Bonizzi is an Italian photographer and filmmaker who is based in Glasgow.

During the residency period, audiences will be invited to a Meet the Artists event where they will be able to have informal discussions with the artist.

More info about the artists...

Valentina Bonizzi

Valentina Bonizzi is an Italian artist who has been resident in Scotland for six years and obtained her MA in Research in Creative Practices from the Glasgow School of Art in 2010.

Working from the position of a 'contemporary European immigrant', Valentina explores a discussion between the “two small realities” offered by having both an Italian and a Scottish perspective.

Working with how time is made legible in representations of place, Valentina’s practice displaces politics and identity into the mechanism of the technical representation of time and place: still photography and the moving image.
Currently Valentina’s practice is undertaking a move towards experimental film making, through which she intends to reveal her investigation into the perception of personal stories within a historical context.

Valentina has exhibited her works both in Italy and in Scotland and received a Creative Scotland Visual Arts Award in 2011.

Sam Spreckley

Sam Spreckley is a video artist trained and based in Scotland, he graduated from the MSc Electronic Imaging programme at DJCAD in 2008.

The artist’s main creative interest lies within the area of the moving image. Focusing upon the relationships between sound and vision, Spreckley is fascinated in the methods of manupulating what we see and hear in a bid to create an alternate sense of the world we live in. Sound and vision treated as equals are always at the core of the work.

Besides working with digital technologies the artist also continues to develop a body of work centred upon the 8mm/16mm film formats. During the last years Spreckley has focused upon a number of ongoing visual experiments based around the manipulation of celluloid and the area of process, both the chemical and pyhsical.

Sam has exhibited both Nationally and Internationally at both film festivals and various group exhibitions, most recently as part of the UK Young Artists exhibition held in Derby, England.

Kim Walker

Kim Walker graduated from DJCAD in 2006 and completed an MFA with the Sound Department at theSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011.

She hasbeen creatively exploring the emotional investment that participants have when engaged in a game such as video games and traditional childhood games. The projects created have highlighted the expression of emotions associated with success and disappointment through these engagements in play and present a stripped version of many of these game events, with characters, actions and situations frequently becoming ambiguous and isolated.This treatment allows the work to fluctuate between a document and a fictionalisation of the event.

Walker's practice has a focus on the incongruous: in making the familiar unfamiliar and highlighting beauty within the everyday. She creates settings in which the mundane and the ordinary gesture can suddenly invoke existential and poetic meanings.

Walker has presented her work in the Czech Republic, Scotland and the USA and has a forthcoming exhibition at, South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell, UK scheduled for 2012.