LONDON.- In 2010 Latitude Festival announced the launch of Latitude Contemporary Art (LCA) Exhibition and Award with the aim to continue and expand Latitude’s enormous commitment and devotion to the arts.

The LCA team comprises creator of Latitude and managing director of Festival Republic Melvin Benn; independent arts writer Louise Gray; Artes Mundi chief executive and curator Ben Borthwick; curator/deputy editor of The Wire Anne Hilde Neset; managing director of Lavish, Ami Jade Cadillac.

For the 2011 Latitude Contemporary Art programme, five artists have been commissioned to exhibit their work outdoors in the Latitude Festival’s woodland site. These are: Alice Anderson; Graham Dolphin; Andy Harper; Delaine Le Bas; Maslen & Mehra.

The overall winner of the £10,000 LCA Award is chosen by an independent panel of judges on site at Latitude Festival. The prize covers research, development, production costs and artist fees for a new piece for the LCA exhibition at the following year’s Latitude.

Graeme Miller, the artist who won last year’s inaugural LCA prize with his stunning Moth Theatre installation, will also be returning with a new work. As was the case last year, the five artists are constructing exclusive work for their Latitude commissions and the winner will be announced at a glitzy award ceremony on the Saturday evening.

The commissioned artists for 2011 are:

After studying at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Alice Anderson returned to England to take an MA fine art at Goldsmiths where she started to work on autobiographical pieces based on her childhood memories in France, an ongoing exploration incarnated through film, fiction, painting and sculptural installations. In April 2011 Anderson is having her first solo exhibition at the Freud Museum London and will also be showing a major piece at All Visuals Arts to launch the new space in Kings Cross. For Latitude, Anderson will present FOLLOW ME, a large site-specific sculpture made of dolls’ hair and wax. The visitor will be invited to follow a metamorphosing hair rope through the woods in order to discover what is at the other end.

Graham Dolphin’s work appropriates objects and icons of the fashion and music industries, reforming them to reveal the obsessions and formulas of mass culture.
He is yet to unveil his plans for the Latitude, however his recent work has included such stunning pieces as: Bench, an exact replica of the wooden bench that sits in Viretta Park, Seattle, arbitrarily overlooking the site of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994; Rock, 2010 – a re-making of a rock from Joshua Tree Memorial Park, LA, site of the failed cremation of singer Gram Parsons; Tree, 2010 – the tree in Barnes, London, where Marc Bolan crashed and lost his life and a laundry sink from the village of Vallegrande, Bolivia onto which Che Guevara’s corpse was displayed to the world in 1967 (Sink, 2011).

Andy Harper is an artist based in the UK. Predominantly working in painting, he challenges orthodox painting practice, using three dimensional objects and the fabric of buildings as canvas, in both established art venues and non-art sites alike. For Latitude Contemporary Art, he will create An Orrery for Other Worlds, fabricating and painting an internally lit sphere that will be suspended in the woods.
http://www.andyh.net/

Delaine Le Bas creates multi-media installations, using painting, textiles and constructing three-dimensional ‘buildings’ made from embellished and painted fabrics and re-claimed objects. Her works deal with issues of transitional displacement and the subject of being an outsider, in whatever form that may take. For Latitude she will create work called The World Turned Upside Down In The Cathedral Of Erotic Misery (After Kurt Schwitters), a woodland installation which explores the witch hunts of Matthew Hopkins, best known as the 17th-century Witchfinder General. Her secret space, part relic, part hide-out, will offer a place to reflect and contemplate.

London-based collaborative duo Maslen & Mehra present will Common Ground, which continues their experimental work with medium-format photography. Figures from different historical periods and cultures are juxtaposed in compositions, which have been painstakingly created using hand-made mirrored sculptures and drawing. Ghost-like figures appear like spectres from the past, only visible through the light reflected on their mirrored surfaces.

As well as the exhibits, festival goers can also enjoy the Big Screen programme and a Film Gallery, both showing high-quality art films. These film programmes will run in the days and evenings.

GRAEME MILLER – 2010 WINNER AND 2011 COMMISSION
Graeme Miller is a theatre-maker, composer and artist. Emerging from the bold and influential stage work of Impact Theatre Co-operative in the 1980s, a group he co-founded, his own work now embraces a wide range of media, with the idea of being a 'composer of many things' including music, theatre, dance and interventions. Always reflecting a sense of landscape and place, he regularly makes site-specific works to commission. His prize-winning Moth Theatre was an outdoor installation of theatre for moths, by moths, which received the inaugural Latitude Contemporary Art Award first prize. He is currently developing his commission for this year's festival, which the £10,000 prize has facilitated.