Exhibitions & events - August
Many of you might go on holiday during this month, but I’m sure that someone has time to visit some of these exhibitions. And don’t forget that the Notting Hill Carnival is coming up as well (26-27 August).
Spitz Gallery
109 Commercial Street, E1
Richard Heeps: Ordinary Places - until 12th August
Hot rods, hot girls, dragsters, burlesque, Americana and a quintessential collection of English work featuring portraits and interiors.
The show is dedicated to Richard Heeps’ keen eye, highly saturated colours and sophisticated pictorial structures that demonstrate a true love and empathy for his subject matter.
‘In my work, I use colour to find beauty in ordinary things. I am inspired by traces of individuality, timelessness and composition to create extraordinary images with a sense of enduring values’. My work aims to capture the feel of the subject; I record rather than glamorise. Often, the object becomes unfamiliar or strange prolonging perception, as if seen for the first time.
work has strong themes that the public engage with; audiences may leave an exhibition with a print they have purchased but it is the image that they have bought into, with each image forming part of the greater whole of the exhibition.
Tessa France: After The End - from 27th August
The work of Glastonbury based photographer Tessa France is derived from her fascination with post industrial landscapes. After the End is a collection of evocative images that turn dereliction and decay into a thing of beauty.
Many of the images capture a moment frozen in time at one of the largest industrial sites in Somerset, the former Morlands factory in Glastonbury. Whilst the town is renowned for its unique landscape and music festival, these images describe a very different world.
Proud Galleries – Central
Buckingham Street, WC2
Ken Russell’s Lost London Rediscovered: 1951-1957 - until 21st August
An unseen collection of images taken by one of the country’s greatest filmmakers. Celebrated British film director, Ken Russell, reveals photographs depicting a forgotten 1950’s London. The opening private view is also Mr. Russell’s 80th birthday celebration alongside industry peers, friends and London’s press. Prior to earning iconic status as a director, Ken Russell spent several fruitful years working as a freelance documentary photographer in London. The photographs he took during this period chart the progress of Russell’s eye from his late twenties into his early thirties. Sometimes poignant, occasionally surreal and frequently funny, they capture all the irreverence and unconventionality of outlook that would characterize his work as a filmmaker. The images, recently discovered by TopFoto, capture an almost forgotten period in London history: a period of transition from the depressing aftermath of the Second World War to the youth movements and reinvigorated hope of the 1960s. The images document a journey along a lively Portobello Road, as well as providing an intimate close up of the renowned Teddy Girls, through Trafalgar Square into Holland Park and many other personal insights into the day to day life of Londoners.
Proud Galleries – Camden
The Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, NW1
Images Of Apollo – until end of summer
This exhibition presents an unseen collection of official NASA photographs with authenctic NASA serialisation and signatures by the original astronauts themselves. Celebrating a fundamental chapter of Americana, which has almost been forgotten, Proud puts the spotlight on images that ultimately changed the world. The 1960s – 1972 mark the golden years of space travel, during the first and last such voyages to the moon. In an effort to capture the glory of these years in history, this exhibition unveils an unprecedented collection of large format photographs amassed personally by UK based collector, Leslie Cantwell. Cantwell has amassed what is regarded by the industries experts as the worlds largest collection of its kind and Proud Galleries will be focusing on the most critical portion of this collection: The Apollo Missions. These impressive photographs include the explorations of Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, John Young, Michael Collins, Harrison Schmitt, Gene Cernan and of course Neil Armstrong and many more. The collection follows the journey from Apollo 7 – Apollo 17 and includes a substantial collection of original Hasselblad photographs (the official camera of choice used on all missions).
The Photographers’ Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street, WC2
Keith Arnatt: I’m a Real Photographer - until 2nd September
This exhibition celebrates the photographs of Keith Arnatt, whose artistic achievements have for too long been overlooked. Focusing on work from 1972 – 2002 it includes both well known and forgotten pieces. In the late 60s and early 70s, Arnatt used photography to capture his otherwise ephemeral conceptual work. A typically tongue-in-cheek work of this time, Trouser-Word Piece (1972), shows Arnatt wearing a placard stating ‘I’m a Real Artist’. Shortly after this, Arnatt decided to concentrate solely on photography. Created with a knowing, subversive humour this work transcends easy categorisation. The straightforward portraits of The Visitors (1974 – 76) hint at his interest in the history of portrait photography, while playing on the relation between the camera and its subject. Arnatt’s lightness of touch, and ability to transform the commonplace permeates his work. Pictures from a Rubbish Tip (1988 – 89) echo the traditions of still life, but use the discarded and obsolete. Notes from Jo (1990 – 94) record his wife’s Post It note messages such as ‘Pies in oven. Press down thing that says START to Start’. The work irreverently plays on the conceptual concerns of image and text through the irritations and communications of daily life.
Chris Coekin: The Hitcher - until 2nd September
Like a latter-day beatnik, Chris Coekin (b. 1967) has been hitchhiking around the UK off and on for the past six years. Using a disposable camera to produce images as unpredictable as his journey – and a medium format camera for his portraits – Coekin has captured his adventures, the landscapes and the people he has encountered. Through his photographs Coekin shows us crisp packets, McDonald cartons and road kill – the legacy of the 21st century lifestyle on the landscape. The portraits of the drivers who helped him on his way stand testament to the kindness of strangers - an antidote to the ‘stranger danger’ paranoia peddled by the media. His cardboard signs are his tickets to the open road, while images of him standing abandoned by the road-side, are a poignant reminder of his vulnerability as a traveller. Influenced by writers Laurie Lee and Jack Kerouac there is something romantic about Coekin’s ambitions, while the photographs themselves reveal a more prosaic reality. And by adopting the name of the cult horror film The Hitcher Coekin shows a satisfyingly perverse sense of humour.
In Focus: Marysa Dowling - until 2nd September
This display is part of The Photographers’ Gallery recurrent In Focus series. In Focus aims to link the themes addressed in the current exhibitions.
The Movement of an Object links a group of strangers to each other through their relation to a single, banal object – a blue plastic bag. Marysa Dowling’s project shows the movement of an object as it traverses London and is recycled by thirty individuals aged two to seventy-seven. Marysa Dowling will discuss her project The Movement of an Object with writer Chris Townsend on Wednesday 18 July. This evening will also be the launch for her publication The Movement of an Object/Selected Projects.
Mike Perry: Inland - until 2nd September
Inland is a new series of landscape photographs by Mike Perry, taken between 2003 and 2007 in West Wales and the West of Ireland. As in his earlier work, Perry continues to explore the relationship between pure landscape photography and abstract painting but with a looser, less formal style than his previous work. Experimenting with perspective, shorter depths-of-field and uneven horizons, Perry invites the viewer to experience his photography as formal compositions while at the same time embracing the intensity of the actual location. Inland is an atmospheric body of work that depicts a range of expressive textures from damp slabs of stone to prickly surfaces of green gorse, golden grass and moist patches of black heather. By capturing fragments of an imperfect landscape Perry has managed to portray a powerful spirit of place without a traditional narrative, finding a beauty in what others might view as the mundane.
National Portrait Gallery
St. Martin’s Place, WC2
Daily Encounters: Photographs From Fleet Street - until 21st October
This exhibition will draw upon the rich and relatively neglected surviving archives of newspaper photography to tell two parallel stories - one of a powerful industry with an internal culture of its own, and the other of the often uneasy relationship that grew between public figures, the photographic press and the wider population of readers. Placed within the context of the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition will explore the pictorial depiction, through newspaper photography, of Britain and Britishness, the creation of new forms of celebrity, and the scripting and constant redrafting of the rules of engagement between photographers, editors and the subjects of their insatiable gaze. Newspaper photographs of politicians, jockeys, gangsters, models and actors will be interwoven with images of the industry itself; the owners and editors, newsrooms and printing presses, photographers and journalists as they hunted and gathered stories, both alone and in packs.21st Century Portraits - until 28th October
The sixteen photographs in this display reflect the wide variety of contemporary photographs recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. Each year the Photographs Collection acquires approximately 200 new photographs, from a cross-section of professional image-makers, which range from personal projects to commissioned works.
The majority of portrait photographs offered to the National Portrait Gallery have originally been commissioned by magazines and newspapers. John Reardon’s award winning photograph of thirteen chefs posed in a tableaux resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was commissioned for the Observer Food Monthly and has been reproduced many times in other periodicals. This print is in an edition of thirteen.
In contrast, Ghanaian-born Sal Idriss is undertaking a personal project to photograph black British people that are recognised for significant achievement in their professions. His portrait of Sokari Douglas-Camp is one of twenty that the Gallery has collected to date. 1960s model-turned photographer, Jill Kennington, is currently undertaking a personal project photographing her contemporaries, one of which is the designer Margaret Howell.
James Hunkin has recorded prominent people from different fields in a series of collections. His previous collections include theatre people for the Royal National Theatre (1997), religious leaders (Faces of Faith, 1997) and a collection of leading scientists, commissioned by NESTA for Science Year. (2001), examples of which are represented in the collection. The group of six artists shown here is part of a large ongoing commission by the Royal Academy to record all living Royal Academicians.
In The Making: Fashion and Advertising - until 14th October
This exhibition showcases images by leading English fashion and advertising photographers Elaine Constantine, Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones, Alexi Lubomirski, Sølve Sundsbø and Paul Wetherell. Each exemplifies a particular approach to working in the industry such as composition, digital platforms, working with celebrities, the studio and natural light published in magazines.
Audiences readily recognise the faces and products that fashion photographers popularise, but rarely know them by anything other than their picture credit. Together with their work, this display features a specially-commissioned portrait of each photographer by London-based image-maker Immo Klink with quotes from interviews about individual working methods to further reveal the processes of how these team driven images are created.
Diana, Princess of Wales - from 14th July
Marking the tenth anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, this display brings together a diverse range of portraits of the princess by photographers including Lord Snowdon, David Bailey and Mario Testino. Drawn from the Gallery’s Collection, this display covers the years from her engagement to the Prince of Wales in 1981, to her last public charitable campaign in 1997.
The wedding of The Prince and Princess of Wales took place at St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 July 1981. When Patrick Lichfield’s official photographs of the occasion were reproduced globally, no one could have predicted to what extent the ‘fairy-tale’ princess would capture the world’s imagination. The portraits in this display show the development of Diana’s image from a shy teenager to the glamorous and sophisticated woman she became, one of the most photographed in the world.
Four Corners – until 5th August
London is a vibrant city with many different cultures contributing to its success. Londoners are often very proud of the part of London they call home, as well as having great pride in their cultural heritage from other parts of the world. This exhibition has been created by four groups from across London. The National Portrait Gallery has developed partnerships with local London galleries and cultural venues to involve people from the four corners of London in a series of workshops. The participants worked with practising artists and workshop leaders to create their own work in a range of media, using the National Portrait Gallery Collection and their own personal experiences of London as inspiration. Through portraiture, the Four Corners project celebrates London’s richness through the perspective of some of its many different cultures. Displayed alongside the participants’ work are photographic portraits of celebrated Londoners from each of the exhibition’s ‘four corners’ in the National Portrait Gallery Collection. Portraits of Gurhinda Chadha, Trevor Nelson and Andrea Levy are among the works on display.
Devotional – until 25th November
Celebrating black female singers in British entertainment, this unique display is the latest development in the ‘Devotional Series’, a body of work by the artist Sonia Boyce. The display takes the form of an elaborately hand-drawn installation on the gallery walls: a roll call of one hundred and eighty names. The names will be illustrated by portraits of several of the singers, among them Shirley Bassey, Joan Armatrading, Des’ree and Ms.Dynamite. The Devotional Series began with a group of women from Liverpool, brought together with Sonia Boyce through the Motherlode project, in association with the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT). Asked to sing and recall the first record they ever bought, the women in the group began to build a collective map of black women in the British music industry. The first name to be nominated was Shirley Bassey and from that the Devotional Series began. For the first time, with this installation at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Devotional will include nineteen photographic portraits of singers included in the series. Representing the work of prominent photographers working in the music industry, these portraits will include works by Bob Collins, Pennie Smith, Kofi Allen, Albert Watson and Andy Earl.
Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, SW7
Miss Potter: A Life in Photographs - until 10th September
Beatrix Potter’s father Rupert took up photography in the 1860s when it was still a relatively new art form. An enthusiastic and skilled amateur, he was elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1869 and later contributed to photographic exhibitions. Rupert’s favourite and most forbearing subject was Beatrix herself. Photography was an expensive and laborious process but she appears to have endured patiently the elaborate choreography and the camera’s uncomfortably long exposure. This photographic account of Beatrix’s life from childhood to marriage is a legacy of Rupert’s passion for both photography and his beloved daughter. He captures her at home in London and on holiday in the countryside; sombre and formal among family, relaxed and playful among her pet dogs and rabbit, Benjamin Bouncer.
Curtis Moffat: Experimental Photography and Designs, 1923-1935 - from 2nd August
Curtis Moffat created dynamic abstract photographs, innovative colour still lives and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early 20th century. He was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design. Moffat’s archive, containing over 1,000 photographic prints and negatives as well as press cuttings, scrap books and ephemera, was generously donated to the V&A in 2007 by Penelope Smail. The donation is celebrated by featuring some of its highlights in this display. It also acts as a starting point to study Moffat’s pioneering but hitherto little-known work in more depth.
Photofusion
17a Electric Lane, SW9
21st Century Types: A Photographic Study - until 24th August
Grace Lau’s photographic project began during research in picture archives and collections for her book “The Chinese: Early Photographic Representations” in which she explored photographic portraits made by Westerners during the turbulent years in China between the Opium wars and the Boxer Rebellion. 21st Century Types combines and addresses the politics of cultural representation, the genre of contemporary portraiture and the question of visual “archives”. During 2005, Lau set up a studio in Hastings, South East England, to photograph passers by with her 30 year old Hasselblad camera, using colour negative film and natural ambient light. The props included an exotic painted backdrop, antique Chinese furniture found in local junk shops and the ubiquitous patterned carpet that was displayed in Victorian portraits. The panda rug represented an ironic nod to the tiger and bear skin rugs that were popular with Victorian colonialists. Lau found people were intrigued by the exotic studio setting and collaborated willingly when she asked them to create formal poses, as in Victorian portraits. The discrepancy between the historic cultural context and the modern appearance of her subjects is highlighted by the overall formal presentation and by their personal accoutrements such as coke bottles, chips, ice-cream, mobile phones, sunglasses and plastic shopping bags.
Tate Britain
Millbank, SW1
How We Are: Photographing – until 2nd September
This is the first major exhibition of photography ever to be held at Tate Britain. It takes a unique look at the journey of British photography, from the pioneers of the early medium to today’s photographers who use new technology to make and display their imagery. The images in this exhibition have come from the length and breadth of the UK, and include well-known oeuvres alongside mesmerising lost masterpieces. As well as famous names – William Henry Fox Talbot, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Bill Brandt, Madame Yevonde, Susan Lipper, David Bailey and Tom Hunter among them – the exhibition includes postcards, family albums, medical photographs, propaganda and social documents. It includes work by many women photographers and photographers from different cultural backgrounds who are usually underplayed in the history of British photography.
Tate Modern
Bankside
Global Cities - until 27th August
Global Cities looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo. Exploring each city through five thematic lenses – speed, size, density, diversity and form – the exhibition draws on data originally assembled for the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale. This unique show presents existing films, videos and photographs by more than 20 artists and architects to offer subjective and intimate interpretations of urban conditions in all ten cities. As Global Cities takes place in one of the focus cities, the exhibition uses London as a touchstone for comparison.
Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place, SW3
Dr. Harold Edgerton - until 4th August
Dr. Harold Edgerton was born in Freemont, Nebraska on April 6, 1903.
He was raised in Aurora, Nebraska, then entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1926. He died in 1990. Edgerton was a professor at MIT and inventor of the electronic flash, and devoted his career to recording what the unaided eye cannot see. His photographs illustrate such moments as: a bullet seen the instant it explodes through an apple, a perfect coronet formed by a milk-drop splash, and a football dented by the contact of Wes Fesler’s booted foot. These images have become classics of modern art and science. Edgerton was the first to take high-speed color photographs and was a pioneer of multiflash and microsecond imagery, which he used to take detailed photographs of hummingbirds in motion, as well as the progression of athletes’ movements. These wondrous images have shown us things we were never able to see before, in photographs that are as remarkable for their precision as for their beauty.
AOP Gallery
81 Leonard Street, EC2
AOP Document - until 8th August
In it´s third year, AOP Document 2007 showcases 72 outstanding images selected by a high profile panel of judges. Having been previewed at the Photography Awards 2007 in March of this year, AOP Document begins its tour at the AOP Gallery, London. Faced with a record number of entries, the judges selected a stunning collection of imagery, being both pertinent to today´s photo journalistic styles along with covering current and long standing political issues.
Shoot London - 10th & 11th August
A Shoot Experience is a photography event that provides an artistic platform for members of the public to creatively engage in an area and discover its hidden treasures, guided by a set of clues that must be deciphered, found and photographed. Participants work in teams, pooling their creative resources to think up original and interesting ways to capture clue destinations and concepts on camera. The results are always an eclectic and inspiring collection of photographs that capture the unique spirit and character of the area they represent.
Throughout May 2007 Shoot Experience toured a Water themed event to four cities, the exhibition will showcase a range of photographs from Shoot Toronto, Shoot London, Shoot Liverpool and Shoot Bath, creating an engaging and contrasting display of urban environments and participatory play.
AOP OPEN 2007 - from 22nd August
In it´s eighth year, the Association of Photographers OPEN competition goes from strength to strength and continually surprises with the originality and creativity of the work on show. This year the judges were faced with a record number of entries to search for outstanding imagery,the highest standards being met in all genres. The AOP OPEN offers a rare opportunity for amateurs, emerging photographers and established professionals to contend on a level playing field.
AOP Members Showcase - until 19th September
AOP members have been invited to exhibit their work at Home Bar in collaboration with the AOP Gallery. Following a great response from members an eclectic mix of imagery from six AOP members will be on show from June 19th 2007 for a minimum of three months. Members taking part are: Judith Katz with two separate series of works, one of which won a Bronze in the Still Life section of this years Photographers’ Awards. Anthony Marsland, with a new stunning series inspired by Ashtanga-yoga. Edward Webb with part of his series of black and white images from the Greek Island of Ikaria. Chris Gascoigne, showcases one of his images taken from a series of eleven banal scenes photographed in incredible detail using a unique process. Minimal compositions of both interiors and lifestyle are bought to us by Andy Eaves, while Jon Hall showcases two contemporary Camera-Less photographs.
Host Gallery
1 Honduras Street, EC1
“Sorry, we cannot connect your call” Laurie Fletcher - from 8th until 31st August
Every day thousands of people travel on the London Underground, where etiquette demands that people do not speak to their fellow travellers and rarely even hold eye contact. Amidst the people pushing, pulling, tutting and the general frustration, one voice remains polite and calm; “Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” This was the inspiration behind Laurie Fletcher’s project, a project that puts a face to those voices that speak to and connect us all. In an increasingly anonymous and mechanised environment such iconic voices often play a central role in people’s lives, and are as sonorously recognisable as todays celebrities are visually. These
dis-embodied voices surround us everyday in society, whether it’s: “Day 35, 8:58 in the Big Brother house”, an apologetic response to a misdialed number, or the final score of your local football team.
Laurie’s personal and engaging portraits show each subject at home, allowing the viewer the opportunity not just to see the face behind the voice, but to get a sense of who they are in their personal space.
Atlas Gallery
49 Dorset Street, W1
Andre de Dienes: Hollywood and Nudes - until 1st September
This exhibition, by André de Dienes, comprises rare vintage prints of Nudes made between 1934-1974 and iconic images from Hollywood. Andre de Dienes was born in 1913 in Romania. He initially worked in Paris, for The Associated Press, and in 1936 made his first fashion work. He moved to New York in 1938, where he worked for Esquire, Vogue and Life, but grew increasingly dissatisfied with fashion photography and in 1944 moved to Hollywood, where he was able to pursue his real passion for photographing Nudes. He also freelanced for the big film studios; and worked with, among others, including Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Ronald Reagan, Jane Russell, Anita Ekberg and Marilyn Monroe - de Dienes gave Monroe her first modeling job at the age of nineteen; their association continued until 1953.
Sprüth Magers
7a Grafton Street, W1
Stephen Shore: The Velvet Years - until 25th August
Celebrated for his groundbreaking work with colour photography in such seminal series as American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1973-1979), Stephen Shore is rightly considered one of the most influential photographers to have emerged from the last half of the twentieth century. This exhibition focuses on the period 1965-67 which Shore spent at Warhol’s Factory, a time which was to have a great influence on his own work. As somewhat of a child prodigy, Shore had developed an interest in photography from the age of six and by the age of fourteen had already famously sold three of his prints to Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1965, shortly after an initial request, Shore was invited to take photographs at the restaurant L’Avventura where Warhol was shooting what was to become the film Restaurant. From that time on, Shore spent almost every day at the Factory observing and photographing the many goings-on of a now famous cast of characters - amongst others Warhol himself, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, Billy Name, International Velvet and Paul Morrissey.
White Cube Mason’s Yard
25-26 Mason’s Yard, SW1
Candice Breitz: New Work - until 28th August
Breitz continues her anthropology of the fan with a series of billboard-sized photographs of music communities. The artist brought together groups of Marilyn Manson, Abba and Iron Maiden fans for three separate shoots that took place in Berlin during June 2007. Shot in collaboration with the photographer Marcus Gaab, these portraits, observes Breitz, ‘investigate the relationship between a particular icon and a cross-section of people drawn from the community of fans who sustain that icon’. The group photographs draw on portrait conventions that we associate with the rich and powerful, but transfer these conventions to communities who usually remain invisible. Combining a diverse range of antecedents, from high-fashion photography and school portraits to old-master portraits of royal families, Breitz inverts the pageantry of these occasions, shifting the power and splendour to the lives of the humble fan.
Flowers East
82 Kingsland Road, E2
‘Says The Junk In The Yard’ - from 3rd August
As issues of cultural ephemerality and man-made waste rise ever higher up the social agenda, this year’s summer show at Flowers East takes ‘junk’ as its theme. The works in this exhibition examine our attitudes to the objects that we discard and the value systems that we create, to demonstrate how art can focus these assumptions through a different optic.
The featured artists - who include major figures from post-war and contemporary art in addition to emerging talents on the international scene - confront this timely and contentious subject from a number of angles. Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of recycling plants in the Zhejiang Province of China make visible the human cost and environmental impact of our twenty-first century obsession with excess. Commenting further on the malignant effects of materialism, David Hughes’ ‘Untitled (Conveyor Belts)’ is a visual statement of the blot we have created on our landscape, whilst Derek Boshier’s ticket series shines a light on the minutiae of our culture of disposability.
Following the lineage of Duchamp, a number of the artists take up the discourse of the found object to explore how seemingly redundant matter can be re-substantiated with aesthetic value. Jessica Stockholder’s work commands contemplation of objects we normally perceive as carrying little significance. Graham Hudson scavenges junk to create absurd assemblages on a mockingly aggrandised scale, and Peter Blake presents us with carefully curated cabinets of kitsch that, in another context, would appear as clutter.
Whilst it is the concern of some of the artists to appropriate junk as their medium, others cite it as their visual goal. By producing work that affects the appearance of the outcast or expendable, these artists disorient the viewer and upturn traditional systems of value. Gavin Turk’s deceptive bronze replica of a sleeping bag, entitled ‘Nomad’, juxtaposes notions of the marginal and itinerant with the literal and symbolic weight of its medium. Susan Collis’ ‘Better Days’, a dustsheet apparently splattered with paint, reveals itself on closer inspection to be a form of blank canvas, painstakingly embroidered with technicolor thread.
The title of the exhibition is taken from a lyric in the Beatles’ song ‘Junk’, which was written at the time of The White Album but omitted from the final recording. Widely considered as a critique of consumerism and capitalist decadence, the song’s critical thrust and flair for cultural commentary - together with it’s ‘discarded’ status - make it a fitting reference point for a show that seeks both to explore the boundary between aesthetics and excess and blur the line of demarcation between the object and the abject.
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