As I bustled into the “Shire Gallery“ off the cold streets of Stafford the woman on the reception desk eyed me like I’d just escaped from the prison up the road, the hoody and scarf over my face I was wearing to fend of the cold had backfired on me. Its not a preposterous notion, I suppose, the Prisons had regular escapes in the last few years and whose to say a recently emancipated felon wouldn’t want to culture himself after months or maybe years of pool tournaments and sodo-mistic showers. But I digress, the point is an uneasy battle of wills and eyes (because that’s all she could see of me) was initiated between me and the little brown haired snipe on reception for the rest of my time in the gallery. I was on her turf and she wanted me to know it. This was the start of an uncomfortable visit. . .
“Drawing with Light” is a collection not of drawings with light but a loose collection of light related art works awkwardly crammed into the entrance of the Town House in Stafford comprising of works by Joanne Berry, Rob & Nick Carter, Raphael Daden, Cia Durante, Michael Shaw and Tony Stallard.
I got another dirty look off the woman as I began my odyssey around a world of light.
The first piece fighting for wall space was an untitled triptych of three photographs that didn’t deserve the wall space in the first place. Florencia Durante’s use of long exposure photography while moving a light around in front of the lenses is just not interesting or technically skilled. The fact that she’s then put these light trails over a three portraits of old men does really do much to save it. I tried not to let this bad start affect my overall openness to the exhibition but I could now feel the little bint at the desk staring daggers at me now, through the back of my hood.
Thank god the next piece I my eye arrived at (there was no need for a change in position, unfortunately) was something that had some relevance to my own interests. Rob and Nick Carters images of light trails made by interpreting music using a machine called a Harmonograph. This is basically interpreting music into mathematical form and then using that to create an artistic product and I find this to be something hugely interesting it combines the three essential ways that people try to interpret the world :Mathematics, Science, Art (huge subjects) in simple continuous lines.
I simply could not believe how much interest I provided to the young woman she had been looking at me now for a good 10 minutes without any real sort of relent, maybe she was falling madly in love with me. . . . Thankfully the next piece was around the corner! Unfortunately the piece was actually the worst piece of art that has ever fouled my retinas, maybe the convicts had all been on a foundation course and this was there exhibition?
Tony ‘Double ‘Ard Bastard‘ Stallard’s ‘Alpha’ is a work dealing with the ‘glimpsed nature of light’ which means that you look at this pile of shite through a hole. When you do look through this hole your greeted by a Bruce Naumann style neon light piece in a very shoddy looking space. There was literally a paint can left in the space. When I came back from the hole I looked at the garb an it specifically said that this was an intentional part of the piece and beyond that it offered no explanation. I was left utterly bewildered by this and it proved to be the final straw.
I rounded the corner to the square gaze of her, she must have been staring at me through the wall! I was sweating profusely as pulled the push handle and bundled through the door once again out onto the cold nasty square of Stafford in mid-winter.
Out of the frying pan into the freezer.
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1 comment:
Well written article.
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