Darren Almond

Artist Research for Docent Reference

Docent Researcher Sabra Feldstein

Artist: DARREN ALMOND

Biodata

Date of birth 1971

Place of Birth Wigan, England,

Current residence Currently lives and works in London.

Education Winchester School of Art, Winchester, England, B.F.A. 1993

Major Shows/Galleries

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Darren Almond's solo exhibitions include those at The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999); De Appel (2001)[6]; Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Britain (2001); K21 Düsseldorf (2005); Museum Folkwang Essen (2006); SITE Santa Fe (2007); Parasol Unit (2008); and Darren Almond: The Principle of Moments, White Cube Gallery, London (2010).

Selected Group Exhibitions

Darren Almond's group exhibitions include Sensation (1997-1999); Berlin Biennale (2001); Venice Biennale (2003); The Busan Biennale (2004); The Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2005); Moscow Biennale (2007); and the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain (2009)

Media

Darren Almond uses ‘sculpture, film and photography to produce work that harnesses the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations, producing works which have universal as well as personal resonances.’ [3] His first exhibited work, A Real Time Piece (1995), was a live video link that showed his studio, empty but for an industrial flip-clock on the wall that amplified the passing of each minute. [4] In 1996 Almond was awarded the Art & Innovation Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, followed by his solo exhibition at White Cube, London in 1997. Since 1998, Almond has taken a series of photographs on nights with a full moon, using extended exposure times of fifteen minutes or longer. The Full moon series began as a way of navigating the places of traditional landscape painters but has evolved over time to include other remote locations.

Technique & Contextual information

Darren Almond’s diverse work, incorporating film, installation, sculpture and photography, deals with evocative meditations on time and duration as well as the themes of personal and historical memory.

Almond is interested in the notions of geographical limits and the means of getting there – in particular, culturally specific points of arrival and departure. Since 1998, Almond has been making a series of landscape photographs known as the Fullmoons. Taken during a full moon with an exposure time of 15 minutes or more, these images of remote geographical locations appear ghostly, bathed in an unexpectedly brilliant light where night seems to have been turned into day. Many of Almond’s works are filmed in wide ranging – and often inaccessible - geographical locations such as the Arctic Circle, Siberia, the holy mountains in China or the source of the Nile. The artist followed a sulphur miner in Indonesia during one of the labourer’s daily journeys from the mouth of a crater to the weighing station to produce Bearing, shot with a high definition camera. In Schacta, Almond filmed the activities of a Kazakhstani tin mine and set them against a haunting soundtrack – made as a field recording – of a local female musician/shaman during her performance. Other works explore themes closer to home: Traction is an ambitious three-screen projection that draws a portrait of the artist’s father, laying bare external and internal scars, whilst revealing the artist’s preoccupation with time. A similar intimacy is evoked in If I Had You, a multi-screened film installation about the artist’s grandmother – a tender portrait of youthful reminiscence and the dignity of old age. In Terminus, Almond negotiated relocating the original bus shelters of the town of Oswiecim (formerly Auschwitz) to make a moving installation about historical loss. Another realisation of time was achieved with the work Tide, in which 600 digital clocks were lined up along the entirety of a wall simultaneously registering the relentless passage of time, especially relevant to the ‘clocking in and out’ procedure of mechanised labour.

Influences (historical/personal/political)

Darren Almond is interested in time, place, personal history, and collective memory. He makes sculptures, films, photographs, and works on paper based on his extensive travels, which often take him to remote locations—his film In the Between, 2006, which focuses on the symbolic nature of the highest train route in the world, was shot on location in China and Tibet. Almond has developed his own lexicon in photography, making extraordinary pictures using only the light of the full moon. Meantime (2000), his first exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, comprised a shipping container the artist had transformed into a functioning digital clock and filmed as it traveled across the Atlantic.

Other Comments/ Information about work or life

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/34941/darren-almond/

http://www.crownpoint.com/artists/darren-almond