SOUTH CAMBRIDGESHIRE.- In response to an open call, nearly 300 artists applied to take part in Wysing Arts Centre’s residency programme, The Future, in Autumn 2014. The selected artists who will be working with Wysing from 3 November – 12 December 2014, are:

• Olivier Castel
• Julia Crabtree and William Evans
• Jesse Darling
• Alice Theobald

Over the last ten years, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire has experimented with different programmatic structures, through residency and retreat formats, in order to support artists to make new work. The over-arching theme of Wysing’s 2014 programme, which celebrates the centre’s 25th birthday, is The Future; exploring the potential of the future through what we know of the past. For six weeks the five artists will be in-residence at Wysing’s rural site, developing new work that explores how we live today and what alternative versions of the future might hold.

The autumn residencies will build upon Wysing’s current summer residency programme Futurecamp for which ten artists are in-residence during a ten week period; Bonnie Camplin, David Raymond Conroy, Patrick Goddard, Daniel Keller, Rachel Maclean, Shana Moulton, Ahmet Öğüt, Rachel Reupke, James Richards and Tracey Rose. During Futurecamp Wysing is hosting five conferences that address pertinent issues regarding how we live now, bringing together speakers from different disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology and economics, alongside artists.

A public programme of events will take place during the autumn residencies, where the artists and other invited speakers will give presentations at Wysing, to offer new ideas around the theme. Work developed at Wysing Arts Centre goes on to be exhibited in our gallery and through our network of partner organisations nationally and internationally.

Wysing’s Director, Donna Lynas said: “We are looking forward to working with such an interesting group of artists at Wysing this autumn. We’ve been developing our residency programme so that we can increasingly offer support to more established artists as well as those at the beginning of their careers, and it’s exciting to be able to give them this springboard at a key point in the development of their practices.”

Olivier Castel has presented work under thirty different identities since 2001, each of which is associated with a different body of work, whilst also sporadically appearing under his own name. He uses ephemeral or temporal forms – primarily projection, light, surface, text and audio – as a set of propositions to explore the process by which an idea, space, image, or thought is made visible. Recent solo exhibitions include Fountain, Ibid, London, 2014, a staging of the unrealised feature film Le Moine, 1970, by Luis Buñuel; The Back of an Image, Rowing, London, 2013, a room with a computer-controlled moving light programmed to reproduce Castel’s handwriting, tracing text across the walls from poems, texts and doodles, intermittently repeating the phrase, ‘a film without images’; and Imaginary lives/Eight hearts, Hayward Gallery, London, 2012.

Julia Crabtree and William Evans have worked together for the last nine years in what they describe as an ‘experiment in shared subjectivity’. Their work is rooted in making sculpture as art work, prop, or tool within a larger process, to create installation, video, print and performance. Recent work explores what happens to objects and images when they are put through a digital blender – via scanning, CGI, virtual staging and simulation – to be expunged out into the world in another format. Their work Antonio Bay, 2014 – which began by virtually modelling the galleries and filling them with smoke – is currently on display at South London Gallery, the culmination of their Nina Stewart Residency. Other solo exhibitions include Hyper Bole, Legion TV, London, 2014 and Jetty, James Taylor Gallery, London, 2009.

Jesse Darling – JD - works in sculpture, installation, text and "dasein by design", thinking about networked subjectivity and the way that structures - architectural, [bio]political, philosophical - manifest in physical and social bodies. Recent solo exhibitions include presenting a series of new sculptures in How Can It Hurt You When It Looks So Good with Arcadia_Missa at START Art Fair, London, 2014 and Not Long Now at LimaZulu, London, 2014. Recent group exhibitions include Ends Again at Supplement Gallery, London, 2014 and Snow Crash at Banner Repeater, 2014. JD is represented by Arcadia_Missa, London.

Alice Theobald produces live performance, video and installation, exploring the tension between authenticity and spectacle, form and feeling, and cliché and collective empathy, using moving image, text, spoken word, dance and music. Borrowing from the vocabulary of film, television, literature and pop music, Theobald's work circles questions of representation and manipulation – in particular with constructs of the self within private and public space, of the emotions, of language and human relations. Selected performances, exhibitions and screenings include: I’ve said yes now, that’s it., The Chisenhale Gallery Interim, 2014 and Outpost, Norwich, 2014; Foam, P/N Gallery, 2014, AFTER/HOURS/DROP/BOX, Spike Island, Bristol, 2014, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2013; Young London, V22, London, 2013; and They Keep Putting Words In My Mouth! An Operetta of Sorts, Pilar Corrias, London, 2013.