James Webb: Ecstatic Interference

‘Ecstatic Interference’, James Webb’s latest solo exhibition at blank ‘projects’ conjures a syzygy of unspoken inter-relational dynamics, somatic energy, and psychological undercurrents. The exhibition will feature 3 new sound installations: a multi-channel, monolithic speaker stack, a stereo array, and a single-channel Holosonic audio beam.

The show is composed together to create a dynamic body of aural and minimalist, monochrome physical forms.

Writing on Webb’s practice, the artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle, says,

“The works of James Webb circulate around a complex mixture of emotional and affective states; of longing and despair, of the ecstatic and of hopefulness, states of bodies and minds that move throughout his practice to raise questions of individuality and community, belonging and displacement, fragmentation and recuperation. Webb consistently and methodically captures a multitude of figures and forms – bodies, and especially voices of contemporary existence at their most tenuous. Yet what he reveals, through acts of recording and of transmitting, is how such tenuousness is often so profound.”

(Brandon LaBelle, The Precarious Body, 2015, included in the book Xenagogue, Hordaland Kunstsenter)

James Webb has presented his work around the world at institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, CCA Kitakyushu in Japan, and the Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan. Major international exhibitions include the 12th Bienal de la Habana, 55th Biennale di Venezia, 3rd Marrakech Biennale, the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival and the 9th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon. His work is represented in the collections of the Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, the Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, and Vranken Pommery, Reims.

In July 2016, Webb will create a new site-specific project for the Théâtre Graslin as part of Le Voyage à Nantes, and in November 2016, Prayer (Stockholm) will be exhibited at Historiska, Stockholm. Webb is the recipient of an IASPIS studio grant for 2016.

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