Gallery Archives - Page 9 of 17

Archipelago (ˌɑːkɪˈpɛlɪˌɡəʊ) 1. a group of islands 2. a sea studded with islands [C16 (meaning: the Aegean Sea): from Italian archipelago, literally: the chief sea

An exhibition presented by staff from the School of Art & Design that featured experimental practice from a range of art and design disciplines. The works demonstrated the complex process of creation undertaken by practitioners / researchers within the School community.

Artists were asked to consider themselves and their practice as islands, which sit in proximity to other islands. An island could be the work of one practitioner, that of an established collaboration, or a group brought together by a common concern. These islands were represented spatially within the exhibition to create a place of dialogue and exchange.

Lucuna by artist Joy Buttress investigates the current interpretation of lace in contemporary visual culture. Lacuna explored the interface between skin and pattern which is created by lace fabric when worn on the body.

The work in this exhibition portrayed human skin through the use of leather and latex; embedding meaning and emotive boundaries through the application of decoration and pattern. Hand processes that include forms of stitch, and machine processes of laser etching and digital embroidery, were combined to create unfamiliar surfaces.

This exhibition explored how the ritualistic activities of these groups and individuals can be realised by actors and interpreted in moving image.

Exhibiting artist Ben Judd used performance and video to explore notions of scepticism and belief, freedom and immersion, by positioning himself and the audience as both participant and observer.

Previous work has explored Ben’s relationship to particular occult and esoteric beliefs such as witchcraft, shamanism and spiritualism; as a sceptic he attempts to test the extent and nature of his own beliefs and preconceptions.

In the ancient form of mandarin the title represents the creative processes and working practice that facilitated this exhibition. Dance artist Lucia Tong, Dance4 and Nottingham Trent University MA Framework students collaborated to create an immersive and interactive installation – interpreting the meaning of Luàn through movement, installation, photography and textiles.

Five by Five: Unloud

Northern Russia has been described as being shrouded in a rare serene stillness and beauty undermined by the decaying presence of evil. Unloud looked at this idea: a place of limits, a frontier or an extreme situation incorporating the extremes of climate, geography and nature, faith, brutality, beauty and fantasy.

Five by Five: Presenting Absence: Moving Images of Palestine

Curator: Dr Anna Ball, Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Nottingham Trent University

A lost homeland, a dispossessed population, a missing film archive: images of absence haunt Palestinian national consciousness. Bringing together works by leading film-makers and video artists, this exhibition explored the dynamic relationship between presence and absence in moving images from or about Palestine.

Five by Five: Chromista

Curators: Geoff Litherland and Jim Boxall, School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University

Chromista are water organisms that photosynthesise, taking advantage of any light that breaks through the surface. Likewise the films that were selected for Chromista exploit the physical surface of the projected image; light and imagery is abstracted to create works whose process of creation dictates the final image.

Five by Five: Alumni Filmmakers

A showcase of work from the narrative to the abstract, each day focussed on a different artist. A group of Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design alumni film-makers were invited to screen one of their own works and two further short films which have either influenced or compliments their chosen piece.

Five by Five: Water, love runs down

Curator: Jenny Chamarette, Department of Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London

Water has the capacity to distort and magnify light and sound: it bends and reshapes these elemental parts of the moving image to create something altogether different from what we might usually experience. In this programme drawn from moving image artists, filmmakers and public information broadcasts, water is both an inspiration and a distraction, for viewers and filmmakers alike.

Fuelled by a continued resurgence of lace in contemporary culture and art and design practice, Lace:here:now was a season of events that took place in the city that was once at the heart of the lace manufacturing industry – Nottingham. In recognition of the value of lace and its importance to the identity of Nottingham and beyond, Lace:here:now celebrated the heritage of Nottingham lace and demonstrated that lace still inspires, fascinates and excites.

Students from the Textiles, Fashion and Decorative Arts courses at Nottingham Trent University were inspired by its lace archive to produce drawings, textiles, products and investigations. Using the rich heritage of the archive to form the starting point, they explored the concept of lace, exploring materials and the use of heritage to inform design thinking for a new generation of designers.

Art Dates is a new series of social art gallery-based events hosted by SHEAfriq, a Nottingham-based creative collective of woman creatives of African descent. SHEAfriq aims to provide a relaxed and casual environment for art lovers and non-art lovers alike to interact and engage in fruitful conversation about art, followed by a creative activity over drinks.

For this session of Art Dates, we invite you to join us for the last days of Bonington Gallery’s exhibition The Accumulation of Things (curated by Adam Murray) with Joy Labinjo, one of the exhibiting artists and Saziso Phiri from SHEAfriq. They will discuss the exploration of culture and identity through art, how race and representation came to be key themes in Joy’s work, and her highlights to date as a young award-winning artist. The conversation will be followed by a Q+A and short creative activity over light refreshments.

Joy Labinjo (born 1994) is a painter living and working in Newcastle. Joy’s paintings draw on her British-Nigerian heritage and examine the complex relationship between identity, race and culture. In 2018, Labinjo was awarded with the Woon Foundation Art Prize, considered to be one of most generous prizes in the art world.

Saziso Phiri is a cultural producer and independent curator living and working in Nottingham. In 2015 she founded The Anti Gallery, a pop-up art gallery inspired by urban culture often exhibiting and engaging art in alternative gallery environments. Saziso has been a member of SHEAfriq since 2017.

THE ACCUMULATION OF THINGS

The Accumulation of Things is an exhibition curated by Adam Murray, bringing together seven artists whose work deals with shared interests of experience, circumstance and the familiar. Personal histories both real and imagined are examined through painting, photography and sculpture.

Video Days takes its title from the 90s skateboard video by Blind Skateboards. Produced in 1991 by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze, the iconic video depicts street and park skating in the US, and is considered one of the most influential skate videos of its time.

For the duration of 25 days the gallery will be transformed into an open cinema. Running daily, Video Days presents a different film or series of short films each day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes, most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.

The films on display do not come with a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). We therefore advise that some of the films shown may contain scenes of nudity, discrimination, violence, drugs, imitable behaviour, and language unsuitable for young or vulnerable viewers. If you have any questions prior to visiting the gallery, please get in touch.

WEEK FIVE SCREENINGS

Preceded by a single screening of Ashley Holmes’ Everybody Hustling, 2017. Followed by Q+A hosted by Jonathan P. Watts, visiting Lecturer, BA (Hons) Photography.

Richard Paul, All that is Solid, 2018, (13 mins), shown in 3D.
Looped all day.

A 13-minute video by Richard Paul in which a narrator describes an unspecified city, the materials constituting its construction, and the myths connected to these material elements. Close-up images of crystals, stone and metals float gently in space before the viewer, captured using stereographic photography, rendering them in three dimensions, almost touchable. Meanwhile, a dulcet voice describes wheels rolling over iron pyrite streets, how quartz governs a subterranean electronics systems and how concrete is constructed into towers and geometric barriers. The title of the work is taken from The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels proffer all that is solid, melts into air. As a substance is ingested to induce a hallucination or dream state, the cityscape warps, as does the consciousness of the narrator, who dreams of further, more fantastic materials.

WEEK FOUR SCREENINGS

Beach House, Shingle St, Suffolk Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape. Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms.

John Maybury, Read Only Memory, 1998, (92 mins). Courtesy of Lux, London.
Screening times: 10 am, 11.45 am, 1.30 pm, 15.15 pm

Maybury’s significant contribution to experimental film and video becomes apparent through a complex reworking of his own archive footage.

Reactor, The Gold Ones, 2018, (10 hours).
This special edit of The Gold Ones will run in it’s entirety, 10 am – 8 pm

The project is an evolving narrative, that uses video, performance and installation to explore an imagined future inhabited by characters collectively known as the Gold Ones. When Max Gold’s video transmission first came through in 2014, he named himself ‘one of the Gold Ones’. After tracking Max for a period, filming began in the space known as the Cosmic Care Home (CCH). Initially remaining in what could be described as the outer or back spaces of the CCH, looking through the walls that are at times transparent, or listening in on voices from the other side. This is where the Gold Ones live, and despite their existence on a higher spiritual plane, beyond the limitations of time – the place they inhabit resembles what would be described as a ‘total institution’. They appear to be predominantly cut off from a wider community, and lead an enclosed and bureaucratically controlled existence. What has been seen to date is some semblance of the outer perimeter, or the first entry point into the body of the CCH. It is intended that you will further get to know the Gold Ones through the documentary that is being made here now, and in the future, about who they were and how they exist.