Exeter College FdA Art & Design Summer Show

Thursday evening was the private view for the FdA 2nd Year Art & Design Summer Show. The exhibition, in the CCI Yard gallery and corridor, includes work by fine artists, photographers, and graphic designers. Also showing, in Victoria Yard opposite, is work by students doing the UAL Foundation Diploma.

Thursday was a warm evening and the event was well attended. Below are photographs of the Fine Art students' work and a few other snaps from the evening:

Clare

Enya

Enya

Jasmine

Karen

Ruth

Ruth

Fiona

Fiona

Phoebe

Debbie

Debbie

Danny

Danny

Kelly

Kelly

Abbie

Abbie

Katie

Katie

Ruth, Debbie, Karen and Katie

Danny being presented with the Fine Art student award

Steve

This is only a taster of the exhibition. The show reopens after half term from Monday 1st to Thursday 11th June, weekdays, 10am - 6pm. The yard gallery and corridor is in the Centre for Creative Industries building opposite Central Station (behind Victoria House). Victoria Yard is opposite, behind the Rougemont Hotel. Check it out.

Sad Day at Spacex ... But High Hopes for 2015

It was a sad day today (21 November) at Spacex, as I did my final volunteer shift. The exhibition programme has been curtailed now that Spacex funding has been slashed by the Arts Council, and Scott King’s De‑Regeneration was the last show in the current programme - at least until the outcome of a new funding bid is known.

This week has been especially busy for Spacex staff with the new bid being finished, a visit by Exeter Uni Arts Society to the gallery, and a series of workshops with primary school children. The last of these was on Friday afternoon.

The kids took a tour of the exhibition and then made their own images and models using projectors, wire, scrap store materials - and a lot of imagination. Despite, or perhaps because of, the weather we also had a number of adult visitors who seemed to enjoy viewing the exhibition alongside the lively and enthusiastic 6 year-olds. 

Although not to everyone’s taste, for me this has been a good exhibition to finish with. It combines humour and cartoon art with some serious questions about the role of public art. It is a hard balance to pull off well but I think that Scott King managed it. The kids particularly enjoyed the illuminated pylon, and a number of them made excellent models of it in the workshop sessions. 

Spacex will continue to run events in the gallery during the first quarter of 2015. Then, hopefully, it will be back with a new programme of exhibitions and activities, subject to the approval of new funding by the Arts Council. We’ll all keep our fingers crossed.

Spacex in the 1980s

You can still add a message of support on the Spacex website here (messages will not appear until they have been moderated).

Spacex: Scott King De-Regeneration (ends 22 Nov)

You will probably have heard by now that Spacex has lost most of its exhibition funding from the Arts Council, and as a result this will be last 'normal' exhibition that it will be showing for a while (showings are already limited to Thursday to Saturday). The gallery is bidding for funding which will support a future programme, but the outcome remains uncertain. However, in the meantime, you can record your support and/or recollections of Spacex on the Support Spacex website page. The more people that show their support for the gallery, the greater the pressure on the Arts Council to help fund future projects.

The current exhibition features the work of Scott King. As it says in the gallery blurb: "Scott King's work frequently addresses iconic and 'monumental' imagery, with the artist often producing prints and sculptures that refer to and question political ideologies". The work does not disappoint. The long wall in the main gallery contains a cartoon strip which tells the story of the Afghan government and their Western government sponsors commissioning Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley to produce monumental art that will save the country, nurture captalism, and lead to a happy ending for the Western powers ...

 

Other pieces include visualisations of deploying coloured balloons to regenerate rundown areas, and statues of Rock Gods in the Thames Estuary (I recognised a couple of the Feelgoods, and what I presumed to be Peter Gabriel, but the fourth geezer defeated me).

This is a cool exhibition, particularly if you have a thing for comics & politics and a scepticism about monumental public art (which I do), and is a good example of why Spacex is still relevant and needed in Exeter. Hopefully, if enough support is shown, Spacex will be back in business in 2015 (and, perhaps, a bit more user-friendly than in the past?) Who knows?

You have until 22nd November to see this show.

SW Academy Open and Four Go Mad in Teignmouth

South West Academy Open

During the rest of this week you can catch the South West Academy Open exhibition at St Stephens in Exeter (opposite Urban Outfitters) . Exhibitors include old friends Anna Grayson & Des Maxwell Clark, and Maureen Fayle from Teignmouth, who received a well-deserved commendation for her picture of Hay Tor.

 

Four Go Mad in Teignmouth

While most of the 2014 Devon Open Studio exhibitions are now finished, the work at TAAG remains on show until Saturday. The artists are Angie Jenner, Julia Vella, Amy McCarthy and Michelle Greenwood Brown and the work includes mosaics, glasswork, and some innovatory illuminated painting.

Glass work by Amy McCarthy

Also on show at the TAAG gallery are some colourful abstracts by Paul Ansell, which are well worth a look. Both the Teignmouth and Exeter exhibitions finish on September 27th.

Phil Root at Spacex to 13th September - Final Week

This week is your final opportunity to see Phil Root's installation, Phantom Limb, at Spacex. The work has been put together specifically for Spacex and is a fun but potentially thought-provoking exhibition.

As it says in the blurb, "Phil Root references history and memory, producing artworks through a process of intuitive layering and erasure of both physical and historical attributes."

The work originated in a collection of corroded and damaged coins. Phil has manipulated the coin images and explored the connections with trade and social labour, while producing blown-up pictures which could be distant moons or views through a microscope.

An eery soundtrack adds to the ambiguous atmosphere. Standing in front of the trestle table in the main gallery is, on one level, like standing on an alien craft - but with echoes of trading schooners from the distant past.

In the projection gallery a video tells the story of the Phantom Limb and there is a peek beyond at a hidden layer or image. 

You have until Saturday 13th September to catch this spare but cleverly constructed show.

Michael Takeo Magruder at Hannah's, Seale Hayne

If you admire Ben Yates' electronic creations then you will probably want to see Michael Takeo Magruder's digital work - Living Data - on show at Seale Hayne, just outside of Newton Abbot. This is a mixture of digitally created hard copy art and screens which are fed by PCs, linked to the internet.  Here are some photographs which illustrate the work:

 

Each of the displays applies an algorithm to an internet information source to produce unique digital visuals. For example, the second work above draws upon a live market feed from the Dow Jones Index to produce its images, while Data_plex (babel), immediately above, is generated by tapping into the top ten topics trending on Twitter, as explained in the exhibit label below:

This exhibition shows just one aspect of Magruder's work. Copies of his 100+ page book, (re)mediation_s 2000-2010, with many colour photos and interesting essays by academics covering (Derrida's) Deconstruction, (CP Snow's) The Two Cultures, The Art of Remembering, and more are available at the exhibition for ten quid. This is a bargain, particularly as the book can no longer be bought on Amazon.

 

 

The results can be very 2001: A Space Odyssey ... or Doctor Who ...

 

 

The display above draws upon images of flowers showing on Flickr (as in the monitor below) and produces a hybrid form which changes - in sync - as new images are posted.

This is a fascinating exhibition. The works seem to be live - which of course they are, insofar as they are responding to the collective actions of thousands or millions of people using the internet. It is impossible to get a realistic impression of the ever-changing images showing on the monitors from still photographs. You really need to visit the exhibition, which is part of the Digital Invasion season at Seale-Hayne, and runs until September 1st.