YOKO ONO
BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
14 December 2008 – 15 March 2009
Yoko Ono is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and has an international exhibition career spanning nearly 50 years. BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents YOKO ONO BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD, comprising work by Yoko Ono from the 1950s to the present day.
This is one of the largest exhibitions of Yoko Ono’s work to date and is a major collaborative project with Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany curated by Thomas Kellein and Jon Hendricks. BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD occupies two gallery floors of BALTIC with additional works located outside the building.
The exterior artworks form part of the 2008 NewcastleGateshead Winter Festival and are located in prominent locations around NewcastleGateshead. ONOCHORD uses light to form a code spelling out “I Love You” or “•, ••, •••” and is presented as a large projection of light from the top of Castle Keep, Newcastle. ONOCHORD takes place daily from Sunday 14 December to Wednesday 31 December from 3.30pm until 8.00pm. A special participatory event incorporating ONOCHORD happens outside BALTIC on Sunday 14 December at 6.00pm. Visitors to BALTIC Square are invited to send and receive “I Love You” messages to and from each other and the Castle Keep.
Yoko Ono’s Film No. 5 (Smile), made in 1968, is projected onto Gateshead Quay on Saturday 13 December from 5.30pm – 9.30pm and on the west face of the Newcastle Civic Centre tower on Thursday 18 December from 4.00pm to 8.30pm. The film, shot with a high-speed camera, records a single smile of John Lennon that evolves over the course of fifty-one minutes.
From Wednesday 17 December visitors to BALTIC will be able to book a ride in Coffin Car, a work originally titled Riding Piece in 1962. The car, (a classic English Daimler hearse) will be located adjacent to BALTIC on South Shore Road and will take visitors for journeys throughout Gateshead and Newcastle. Coffin Car will be available on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays between 11.00am - 4.00pm. Yoko Ono has a strong and irrepressible desire for peace. This desire can be immediately recognised in her Imagine Peace billboards; BALTIC is presenting an Imagine Peace banner measuring an impressive 14.5 metres by 18 metres situated on the north face of BALTIC’s landmark building throughout the exhibition.
Wish Trees, where visitors are invited to express their hopes and dreams by writing wishes on paper and hanging them on one of the trees, are located on Level 4. Wishes from all the trees will be gathered at the end of the exhibition, and sent to the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Videy Island, Iceland, to join the rest of the wishes Yoko Ono has collected from around the world.
Inside BALTIC, the exhibition covers more than 1400m² of gallery space containing sculpture, paintings, drawing, photography, films and sound installations, as well as participation works. For the first time in four years the large picture window at the rear of the Level 3 gallery is uncovered to bathe the floor in natural light.
Among the 50 works featured in the exhibition is Play it by Trust, a conceptual chess set, made from white Italian Carrara marble. A version of the work was first exhibited in London at Yoko Ono’s legendary exhibition at the Indica Gallery in 1966.
Another work, SkyLadder, may be read as an allegory for the exhibition’s title, BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD as it invites us to consider an imaginary, spiritual space centred between the sky and earth. The 29 Skyladders situated on Level 4 were originally seen at the Liverpool Biennial earlier this year; each donated ladder is accompanied by a hand written note and personal wishes from its contributor.
My Mommy is Beautiful, is a participatory piece in which visitors to BALTIC are invited to bring photographs, along with thoughts and memories about their mothers, to be permanently attached to the blank canvases. At the conclusion of the exhibition, the filled canvases will be sent to the artist in New York.
Two film representations of the legendary Cut Piece (1966 and 2003) where Yoko Ono allowed an audience to cut items of her clothing are shown side by side on Level 3. Within Quay, BALTIC’s learning space, visitors are invited to use ‘IMAGINE PEACE’ and ‘I LOVE YOU’ ink stamps to send positive messages to other countries around the globe in Map Peace. Finally moving up to Level 5 visitors can take time to participate in Mend Piece (1966) where hundreds of smashed white cups and saucers can be reconstructed using glue and string.
YOKO ONO: BETWEEN THE SKY AND MY HEAD is accompanied by a 208-page exhibition catalogue edited by Thomas Kellein, director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
YOKO ONO BIOGRAPHY
Yoko Ono, born in 1933 in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. In 1952, she became one of the first women in Japan to study philosophy. In 1953 she took composition courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and studied creative writing at Harvard. In the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono lived in New York City, where she knew John Cage, and many other artists and composers. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street, and together with La Monte Young, organized a series of concerts, attended not only by young musicians and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, but also by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and Isamu Noguchi.
As a young artist, Ono left New York in 1962 in order to return to Japan. During this period she performed several concerts with John Cage and the pianist David Tudor. In the same year at the Sōgetsu Art Center in Tokyo, she began hanging texts as artworks, instead of the pictures she had shown in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York. Her work in conceptual art manifested in the famous collection of works, Grapefruit, which she first published herself on July 4, 1964 in Tokyo. It went on to be published in numerous editions. Some of the works in it date back to the early 1950s. The book divided her oeuvre into chapters dealing with music, painting, happenings, poetry, and objects, documenting her affinity for all categories of art. To this day, she continues to move forward in unexplored territories in her art.
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA
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