- Venue
- The Pop Up Gallery at the New Brewery Arts Centre
- Location
- South West England
Exhibition review: Resonate, reviewed here by Mary Brazil, MA Fine Art.
Wassily Kandinsky believed that colour was capable of creating a resonance or vibration in the soul. Colour was perceived by the eye and affected the psyche; this then resonated through the other physical organs, creating a vibration in the whole, which like music could be felt. Kandinsky was certain that all art was capable of touching and then altering people in this way.
Resonate is an exhibition of professional and graduate work in which painting, photography, printing and sculpture try to affect the psyche of the viewer. We are initially attracted by the colours and shapes, but stay to read the stories. Tom Gowan’s Stranger, stands hesitating, solitary, in front of an open door through which warm light is glowing. Emily Nixon’s Golden Skies, is a portrait created in acrylic by manipulation of photographic images and Hannah Lloyd’s self portraits record the emotional upheaval of the breakdown of a relationship. We think we know what we are seeing but as we stay, we see more. Nixon’s portrait hides the sitter’s indentity, Gowan’s Stranger could be us, we have all felt like Lloyd, devasted, but still present.
Emotional vibration is openly explored by Natasha Barnes investigating the interconnectedness between the conscious and subconscious. Her canvases covered in intense complimentary hues and varying linear and curvilinear brushstrokes ask where one begins and the other ends. Richard Broad forces us to feel what it would be like to make life and death decisions as an explorer by casting a self portrait in bronze and mechanical parts. Which are the questions and which the answers, the human flesh or the cogs and bolts? Timothy Russell’s exquisite prints of his reaction to the space of a quarry, offer us the heady opportunity of both imagining the possibility of space itself and then ourselves, in the space he creates through line and tone.
One of the tensions that vibrates through all art is that we know it is artifice but are willing to suspend that belief. James Pilsworth explores this idea in his artificial landscapes. Gone are the earth, sea and sky and in their place Pilsworth creates a landscape from large blocks of colour. His work allows us to link our idea of a landscape with his, through his choice of colours. He reassures us and this allows us to feel safe enough to see past our own preconceptions to accept his point of view. As viewers we need to be brave to go beyond the artifice of paint on canvas. Joelle Eddowes is another artist who is prepared to take us by the hand. She paints well known internal scenes, a meeting room, Light in a Corridor, but takes the people out of them. Her work seems uncanny, but the intimacy with which she paints and her manipulation of light helps us prolong our visual residence in her rooms.
The plants drawn and painted by Bob Davison vibrate with elemental energy. His works in graphite portray orchids as monumental and confrontational. His work in acrylic, Borders – Crocosmia, 07/08, portrays border plants wildly rioting, exalting in its life force. His linear greens complement the red/orange of his Crocosmia flowers, calling our attention. Davison takes a sight we are used to and gives us an alternative, dangerous perspective. Melenie Morton’s Symphony, a study of birds in flight, does this also. There is an overall sense of beauty looking at her work, but her brushstrokes in tones of blue/grey evoke the underlying violence of fast beating wings and feathers which provoke the sensations of panic and confusion.
14.07.10
Resonate is showing in the ‘pop up gallery’ at the New Brewery Arts, Cirencester, from 14th to the 23rd July, 2010, 10am to 4pm.
(Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912, in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory, 1900 – 2000, 2003, 89)