lightreading (Sonya Lacey + Sarah Rose)

Artist: lightreading (Sonya Lacey + Sarah Rose)

Website: lightreading.net.nz, sonyalacey.net, sarahrose.info

Works at: Seoul Art Space_GeumCheon

Stays in: 2012

Genre: Visual arts, video, performance, installation

Profile: 

- lightreading (Sonya Lacey + Sarah Rose)

Solo exhibition

Lilac Chaser, Other Gallery, The Banff Centre, Canada 2011
News travels faster in a room with no walls, New Artists Show,  Artspace Auckland, New Zealand, 2009

Project

lightreading is interested in the experience of published material. It is a collaborative project initiated in 2009 by Sarah Rose and Sonya Lacey.

lightreading considers the mechanisms of publication and distribution, information as sensory experience, the potential of print as well as how publishing might become more responsive to digital formats.

Award

Asia:NZ grant recipients 2013

Chartwell Trust grant recipients 2012

Visual Arts Residency at The Banff Centre 2011

Creative New Zealand grant recipients 2011

- Sarah Rose

Education

MFA: Glasgow School of Art, Scotland
BFA: Elam School of Fine Arts, New Zealand

Solo exhibition

Between One and Another Turn, Rm,  Auckland, New Zealand, 2012                         
Stray Types, Buccleuch Projects,  Glasgow, Scotland, 2012

Group exhibition

Pilvi Takala, Una Knox Sarah Rose, Transmission, Glasgow, Scotland 2012
MFA International Exhibition, Kunsthaus Berthalien, Berlin, Germany, 2012
30.12.11, MFA Degree Show, Glue Factory, Glasgow, Scotland
Sunday Curators II, Its Our Playground, online
Stay Vector Stay, Glasgow, Fibre Optic Appetite, Black, 5487

- Sonya Lacey

Education

MFA: Elam School of Fine Arts, New Zealand
BFA: Elam School of Fine Arts, New Zealand

Solo exhibition

Greentext Thread, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland, New Zealand 2012
Whatever touches me, St Paul Street Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011
Falling or almost falling, The Film Archive, Auckland, New Zealand, 2010
Making things clear, The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2010
In & Outsides, Newcall, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009
From What position, Window Project, University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2008

Group exhibition

No Colour Blue, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand 2013
Finding real estate in Isreal, Gloria Knight, Auckland, New Zealand 2012
Polygon Window, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand 2012
Running on Pebbles, Snake Pit, Auckland, New Zealand 2012
Force Things, curatorial collaboration with Vera Mey, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
The higher you go, offsite project, Auckland, New Zealand 2011
Horoscope show, Enjoy Public Art Gallery Wellington, New Zealand 2011
Group show, Montclair State University New Jersey, USA 2011
Hands Across The Sea, Victor & Hester, Glasgow, Scotland 2010
Flash Company, Cecil Sharpe House London, UK 2010
New Cartographies for Transversal Ecologies, RM, Auckland, New Zealand 2010
Comb a schooner, curatorial project at Newcall, Auckland, New Zealand 2010

Award

New Cartographies for Transversal Ecologies, AUT University

Works: 

Lightreading (Sonya Lacey + Sarah Rose)

lightreading is a collaboration between Sarah Rose (Glasgow) and Sonya Lacey (New Zealand). The project takes interest in the experience of published material, looking to both online and printed formats to find perceptual potential and contestable ground.

Sonya Lacey and Alex Davidson in conversation

 

On her return to New Zealand following a three-month collaborative residency at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon with Glasgowbased artist Sarah Rose, Sonya Lacey was interviewed by Auckland writer and curator Alex Davidson. The following is an excerpt from this conversation in which Davidson and Lacey address Gloss, a New Zealand soap opera that formed the basis of Lacey and Rose's Geumcheon open studio exhibition in February 2013. Lacey and Rose's ongoing collaborative project lightreading takes interest in the experience of published material, focusing on the potential of print as well as ways that publishing might become more responsive to digital formats:

 

Alex Davidson: So you had been thinking about publications and particularly fashion magazines prior to and during the residency. Then you rediscovered Gloss, a New Zealand television series that screened between 1987 and 1990 that revolved around a lucrative, high fashion magazine and the wealthy family business that published it. Can you tell me more about lightreading’s interest in Gloss?

Sonya Lacey: I had seen references to the series but I hadn’t watched a single episode. But I was aware that the series was about a publishing company and a fictional eighties magazine entitled Gloss. On closer inspection the series became highly relevant to our lightreading project at large. We realized that Gloss was conceived of and set in the period of publishing history in between the early eighties when Apple had developed computers specifically for graphics layout – revolutionizing the production of publications – and the subsequent rise of the internet in the nineties which fundamentally changed the way information moved between cultures and people groups. So the series represents a romantic bubble of time in publishing history. Now magazines are still wrestling with the effects of the internet in both a good way and a bad way and economically printed matter is increasingly less viable. The television series emphasises the ways in which the internet has changed our perception of geographical boundaries and by implication our ideas of what constitutes the local.

 

AD. Was the show ever rescreened?

SL. It’s never been rescreened either within or outside of New Zealand. The works we decided to make during the residency in fact are the beginnings of a larger proposal to have Gloss re-aired. But at the same time we are rethinking potential new audience for the series. What on earth does this crazy 'glitter soap' mean today? Even the glitzy eighties backdrop seems strange. It's a snobby soap. It's no Coronation Street!

 

AD. Can you tell me more about this campaign?

SL. Part of our work that we made in Seoul involved subtitling an episode – our primary focus being to make it accessible to the Korean speaking audience. But then you have to deal with the vast differences between New Zealand vernacular and the more formal Korean language. With the assistance of our wonderful Korean assistant Sophia Lim, we decided to subtitle it as literally as possible, incorporating all the vernacular rather than discarding it. Anyone relying on the subtitles found the dialogue surprising... In the Korean linguistic context the subtitles read as though teenagers were talking to each other because that kind of language simply wouldn’t appear for adult characters on Korean television.

 

AD. You said you saw the work as building audiences for the TV show. Could you potentially tailor the campaign for any location, any

vernacular?

SL. Yes, why limit it to being re-screened in New Zealand and Korea? In the context of internet distribution and the niche communities it creates, it just doesn't seem relevant. Gloss reveals a time when we (New Zealanders) wanted to see ourselves as truly international. The production values were consequently much more sophisticated than any previous local drama. We were 'rich', 'successful' and we ate international food. The process of rethinking the audience for this work highlights flaws in the series that are much more apparent now. This is clear by just listening to our baffling accents and the vocabulary that would even be unintelligible for many English speaking countries.

 

AD. You could restage the campaign for example in Poland, and translate it into the Polish language...

SL. Yes, with Polish reference points perhaps. I wonder what Polish slang was like in the eighties...