Masterclass with Bambitchell and Richy Carey: On Multiplicity and Collaboration

Join artist-duo Bambitchell (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell) and composer Richy Carey for a SUPERLUX Masterclass that focuses on the process of making their recent collaborative video Special Works School (2018). A screening of this work will be followed by a discussion about the artists’ engagement with questions around subjectivity and multiplicity as it relates to collaboration.

The discussion will also address their approach to working between the gallery and the cinema and their experiments in sound within the framework of producing Special Works School.

Special Works School was the codename used by the British War Office between 1917 – 1919 for a group of artists tasked with the job of camoufleur – painters, textile artists, scenographers, designers, sculptors and scenic painters who were employed by the military to work specifically on developing camouflage technology. The artist, armed with the skill of rendering their surroundings with utmost acuity, was appointed to make things disappear.

Bambitchell’s Special Works School takes its name from this military unit to investigate the connections between artistic practice and surveillant technologies. With this new body of work, the duo ask what an overtly aesthetic approach to surveillance can render visible, or invisible. By framing surveillance as an aesthetic practice, Special Works School hones in on the psychic, embodied and material dimensions of surveillance – both from the position of the surveillor and the surveilled.

Bambitchell is an artistic collaboration between Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell.

Since 2009, their research-based practice formed through the moving image, installation and performance works to re-imagine nationalist histories, through the playful recycling of official state documents and institutional archives. Their work has been exhibited at festivals and galleries internationally such as Gallery TPW (Toronto), Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), Articule (Montreal), the Art Gallery of Windsor, and the BFI London Film Festival.

They have been included in a number of publications such as Canadian Art, C Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Routledge published book ​“Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture”.The duo were fellows at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2016 – 2017) and at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, USA (Spring, 2018).

They have an upcoming solo exhibition at Mercer Union, Toronto, Fall 2019.

Richy Carey is a composer. His work looks at the intersection of sound, moving image and language, often with a focus on materiality and collaboration. Recent projects include; Near by, forthcoming (2019); the TWIST (is that you’re just like me), Children’s Exhibition, Tramway, Glasgow (2018); Special Works School, with Bambitchell, Gallery TPW, Toronto (2018); On the waves of the air, there is dancing out there, for Carrie Skinner, Telfer Gallery, Glasgow International Festival (2018); Wondering Soul, with Alexander Storey Gordon, Radiophrenia Live-to-air, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2017); and Memo to Spring, for Sarah Rose, Scottish National Galleries of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2017).

Carey is a PhD researcher in film sound at the University of Glasgow and is the UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence for Glasgow 2018.