artist:
location: Media Alchemists
Gary Stewart will introduce The Materials Montage Mixer, first conceived and designed in 2007 to re-work and re-appropriate archival material functioning as a space which emphasises multiple points of entry to facilitate new lines of enquiry. Using hardware and software as a form of live audio visual performance where disparate elements of images, video, sound, text, meanings, interpretation, structure and rhythm are concretised in an environment or space. Over the last 20 years its has been used as a as a recombinant, re-contextualising and reassembling content performance platform facilitating the manipulation of collective media memory by bending the trajectory of not just the past into the present and the creation of new imagined futures but alsothe crossing between geographic, cultural and conceptual spaces. A platform that is not just political but also an act of freedom that challengesthe typical, oppositional, relationships between artist/participant, artists/audience, knowing/watching.
© Franklyn Rodgers
Gary Stewart is a media artist who is constantly challenging accepted definitions of identity and belonging through a range of theoretical, fictional and artistic frames. For several decades he has been opposed to traditional forms of authority by transforming the very fabric of sound, exploring how sonic frequencies, timbres and primal rhythmic stimuli might enable you to reimagine and reconfigure the dominant narratives that seek to differentiate and create subordinate fractures in society. You are just as likely to experience the outcomes of his artistic pursuits, engagements and actions in social housing estates, international biennales, favelas, cinematic festivals, repurposed storefronts and warehouses, contemporary art galleries, railway stations, national museums, factories, stately homes, former plantations, courts of law, squatter community and national parks. He is a founder member of research, production and performance artist group Dubmorphology and performs as experimental improvisational sound artist Bantu.