Chris Flanagan

2010-01-29T11:43:00.000-08:00

Chris Flanagan is an Australian Installation artist now based in Toronto. His installation practice is as aesthetic as it is conceptual, based around meticulous sculptural making and incorporating elements of video, sound, and interactivity. His reference points include political and pop culture, urban mythologies and an enormous vinyl record collection.

To view recent work click the links above on the right.

Artist CV

Cambridge - the Album Project

2009-10-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

Chris Flanagan has created a new soundtrack for Cambridge, Ontario composed entirely from samples taken from records found in the town's many junk shops and thrift stores. This new score was pressed on vinyl in very limited quantities and surreptitiously returned to the shops where the original albums were found to await discovery at a later date. While music informs much of his work and despite djing for over a decade, this is his first attempt at a finished musical composition.

Cambridge - Album Cover - Chris Flanagan 2009

Download the mp3 album for free here.
To buy a limited edition vinyl copy of the album, contact mrchrisflanagan_at_gmail.com

Cambridge Images

2009-10-21T20:22:00.000-07:00

Photo: Andrew Alfred-Duggan, 2009

Photo: Andrew Alfred-Duggan, 2009

Photo: John Lundy 2009

Photo: Andrew Alfred-Duggan, 2009

Exhibition Catalogue Essay by Jon Davies

2009-10-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

Chris Flanagan, Cambridge
by Jon Davies

Toronto-based artist Chris Flanagan’s new project in Cambridge, Ontario, takes the form of a covert, musical engagement with residents past and present, living and dead, of this small city on the Grand River. Cambridge boasts a picturesque, historic downtown, but has suffered an economic downturn in recent years – like many places in Ontario and beyond. Flanagan discovered that one kind of storefront that was not being boarded up was the city’s booming thrift store business. These shops act not only as trading posts for goods to pass from one set of hands to another, but also as hubs for the community to gather.

Over a number of months, Flanagan collected piles of vinyl records from the thrift stores of Cambridge – adding to the artist’s already copious collection.
A DJ and a big music fan, Flanagan’s prior installation projects have often worked with musical subcultures, pop myth and legend, and the aesthetics of the antiquated. His Art Bwoy Burial (2008), for example, involved a small, disheveled-looking mechanized vulture that “sings” a song that was written by Flanagan and recorded by reggae star Linval Thompson to “endorse” the young Australian-born artist and his talents. Another reggae-themed project, Canada Cold (2009), featured a masked figure in costume as the legendary albino deejay Yellowman wandering through a wintry Canadian landscape. Also resonating with Flanagan’s Cambridge is his The Devil’s Chord (2005) wherein the visitor to a painstakingly dilapidated gallery space would follow a string of clues – hidden in a Scrabble board, a dog’s ear, a cobweb, etc. – leading you on a scavenger hunt culminating in the sounds of an organ that would either play a triumphal harmonic chord or the sinister diminished 5th: dubbed “the Devil’s interval” in the Middle Ages for its evil disharmony.

Despite Flanagan’s fascination with music, this was his first attempt at actually composing: sampling from the records that he purchased, he created an entirely new piece drawn from the records of Cambridge. These were not just musical albums but vinyl “records” of their owners: the hands they had passed through and rooms they had inhabited: the thrift store as municipal archive. Each was at one time desired and – we hope – loved before falling out of favour and being discarded – only to be redeemed by Flanagan. They range from the sounds of a mid-80s local girls’ choir to a strange novelty release featuring a psychadelic cover of the “Lord’s Prayer” by Sister Janet Mead, a nun from Flanagan’s own hometown of Adelaide. The end result is several atmospheric sound collages – some haunting, some catchy, all arguably capturing different moods of the city whence they came – that take on an otherworldly character particularly when human voices are present: the ghosts of Cambridge?

The keystone that holds together the entire project, however, was Flanagan’s decision to release his musical Frankenstein monster back into the wild. Not only would he surreptitiously return his new, hybrid recording into the ecosystem from which it came, but he chose to camouflage his creation. Having pressed very limited quantities of his new album onto vinyl, Flanagan adopted the visual style of a late-60s/early-70s prog-rock album cover – rainbows and lightning bolts in slightly weather-beaten colours, a vintage font – to mimic the kind of obscure but intriguing recording by a mysterious near-unknown artist that musical scavengers like Flanagan hope to find in a thrift store: a diamond in the rough. (The cover also features a rendering of Cambridge's iconic haunted post office, which sits just two doors down from the Right to Life Center.) Appropriately enough, this first release of the fictional Crystal Radio label lists the artist as “Chris Flanagan” and the title as Cambridge, making it a musical portrait of the city’s residents through their cast-off recordings, given back to them without their even realizing it.

Jon Davies is a widely published writer and curator based in Toronto. He recently curated the traveling retrospective 'People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell' for the Oakville Galleries, Ontario. He also wrote a book on Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey's 1970 film Trash for Arsenal Pulp Press (Vancouver), to be published in November 2009. He is the Assistant Curator of Public Programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

Chris - Artist CV

2009-10-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

Click above to enlarge.

Canada Cold

2009-05-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

The protagonist for this video work is unlikely Jamaican sex symbol Winston Foster, a.k.a. Yellowman, who was abandoned by his parents at birth due to his albinism. After a traumatic orphanage upbringing, Foster honed his musical talents and determination to become a reggae star. He reclaimed the childhood taunt of 'Yellow man' and declared himself a sex symbol in a series of outlandish and humorous songs, strutting around countless stages in a bright yellow suit.

This new work centers on sculptural elements, principally, a three quarter size rendering of Yellowman in silicone rubber/latex and foam and a matching mask which is worn by an actor.
This work in progress follows a loose narrative based on Yellowman’s real-life visit to Toronto in the early 80’s. The film chronicles several of the key events in the Yellowman story, as well as some imagined scenarios based on one of his songs; “Canada cold”.(no doubt a response to this visit). The film follows the strange figure wondering through lonely, wintery Ontario landscapes.

Art Bwoy Burial

2009-04-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

"No man can test Flanagan, Him a de best artist inna de nation"
Linval Thompson. Dub Plate, 2008

Photo: John Lundy 2008

Photo John Lundy 2008

Chris Flanagan's fascination with Reggae music and its origins is the root of this installation/sound work. Reggae was born through competition in live dancehalls, as opposing dj's or "soundsystems" vied for supremacy. In a world where music was sometimes literally a matter of life and death, a competitive edge could mean the difference between winning or losing a soundclash, dj's would often recruit sympathetic reggae singers to record unique versions of their hit songs to endorse a specific soundsystem. Transposing this concept onto the comparatively mild realm of contemporary art, this tongue in cheek work, puts the Toronto art community on notice, enlisting roots Reggae legend Linval Thompson to record a unique reworking of one of his tracks telling the world what an incredible visual artist Flanagan is, via a disheveled dancing baby vulture.

The Devil's Chord

2009-03-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

This interactive installation is based around 1980’s computer "adventure" games and requires the gallery visitor to participate in the narrative by following clues to reach an ultimate conclusion. The work centers around a sequence of musical notes banned by the vatican in The middle ages for it's supposedly demonic sound.

This work has shown in different configurations in Australia's Gertrude Contemporary and Canada's Eastern Edge Galleries

Read Chris Flanagan's Gertrude Contemporary Catalogue Essay

Read Andy Best's Eastern Edge Catalogue Essay

Photos: 1 + 3: Dan Monceaux

Photos: 2, 4, 5: John Haney

I put a spell on You

2009-02-26T09:47:00.000-08:00

A narrative photo/slide series documenting the process of making and administering a Haitian Zombie powder to Australia's former right-wing foreign minister Alexander Downer. The photos contain studio made sculptural objects within real environments

Andy Best's Eastern Edge Catalogue

2009-02-01T12:40:00.000-08:00

More Fire

2009-01-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

More Fire is a stop motion animation which follows a day in the life an abandoned hut in the woods from dawn 'til dusk which ultimately burns to the ground, only to be resurrected again in the morning. The hand painted cardboard hut sits nestled in a paper pine forest as comically ominous paper clouds echo the faux-horror score composed specially for the film.

Chris Flanagan's Devil's Chord Catalogue Essay

2009-01-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

Jordy

2008-10-26T10:17:00.000-07:00

An interactive installation based on the myth of lemming suicide and other arctic tradgedies. The installation included a looped projection of lemmings hurling themselves over a cliff edge from "White Wilderness" the Disney documentary chiefly responsible for perpetuating this myth (the lemmings were in fact fired into the abyss on a lazy susan by the film crew). The artifice and disney(land) aesthetic is echoed throughout the installation in the form of an icicle covered cliff, a large boulder with colourful protrodent buttons and hollywood-ized arctic explorer trapped beneath the ice.

Photo: Dan Monceaux

Booty

2008-09-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

A site specific intervention in an Australian housing development. Huge artificial jewels and a treasure chest were left on the development's constructed "tropical" islands in a faux treasure chest.

Glace Hi-Fi

2008-06-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Created for the Montreal World Environmental Congress the project sampled water from various urban water sources (Lachine Canal, holy water from the Cathedral etc) and then served it to the public in the form of appropriately flavoured popsicles. These were served from a mobile ice cream truck come Reggae sound system. A collaborative work with Emily Alfred, Eileen Finn and Amos Latteier.

Photos: Marissa Neave