Gallery ii brochure spring 2011

Sprin

g Sum

me

r

2011

you can takethis as a sign

Graham Martin | THE REVOLUTION IS HEALING10 June – 22 July 2011 | Gallery II

Exhibition Launch & Action Thursday 9 June, 5 – 7pm

Gallery II invites international artist and curator Graham Martin, once a Bradford resident, to return and respond to the city.

Using Beuysian notions of common wounds in relation to the collapse of common humanity and togetherness, Graham uses a variety of approaches and devices to show feelings and wounds as a way of expressing human hurt and togetherness.

In this viewing, the/our wounds are expressed not as something to be prescribed for, to be covered with consumer wound dressings or to be silent about, but as a means of individual and societal healing.

Tim CurtisSchools Linking Network | BRADFORD CITY PARK AMBASSADORS May – July 2011 | Richmond Atrium

This exhibition showcases a schools linking project that over the past 3 years has seen young people, aged 7 – 18, from contrasting backgrounds and schools across the district of Bradford, come together to work with artist Tim Curtis, to produce collaborative artwork inspired by the development of Bradford City Park.

Movies, animation, journalism, mixed-media, collage, replica newspapers, drawing, photography and painting have provided some of the vehicles for their expressive responses to a city transforming in a time of change. Some friendships have begun across the boundaries and these shared, positive and mutually beneficial experiences and memories have been added to the warp and weft of cultures in the city and district of Bradford.

GALLERY OPENING TIMESMon – Fri 11am – 5pm, Thurs ’til 6pm. Other times by arrangement. FREE

CONTACT US

University of Bradford, Bradford. West Yorkshire. BD7 1DP

Find us on Facebook or Twitter www.twitter.com/braduniarts

www.brad.ac.uk/gallery [email protected]

Gallery 01274 233365 Enquiries 01274 235495

Running parallel to this, in Richmond Atrium, we will be showing work by schoolchildren based on their studies of Bradford City Park. They have been working with artist Tim Curtis from the Schools Linking Network to create their own reflections on the Council’s “rebirth of the city” plans.

Punch Records | PROTEST: FIGHT THE POWERFeb – April 2011| Ground Floor, Richmond Atrium & expanding…

Protest: Fight the Power. An exhibition of art with a point

Punch Records presents an exhibition of 20 years of groundbreaking and thought-provoking protest images, featuring the work of graphic designers, hacktivists, artists and photographers from around the world.

Protest: Fight the Power has been specially adapted for Bradford, showcasing hundreds of posters, photographs, images, manifestos, downloads, quotations and ideas. Protest: Fight the Power was launched in Birmingham, 2010, and the exhibition draws from a unique archive held by the British Council. In 2002, Liz McQuiston, a curator and authority on protest and propaganda art, toured a show of British political images through South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique. ‘Up Front and Personal’ was expanded during its tour as local African posters were collected and added to the show.

Protest: Fight the Power is a REMIXhibtion by Scholars and Warriors of images from the British Council’s archives, with additional images and content addressing contemporary issues and emerging technologies. It features new work by cultural agency Redhawk Logistica, design diva mmsix, Afrobeat album artist Lemi Ghariokwu, spray can artist Mohammed Ali (aka Aerosol Arabic), and includes dozens of other artists, designers, and YOU!

Join in now at facebook.com/fight.the.power.show

Parker William | BAD MOON RISINGFeb – May 2011| Richmond Restaurant

Parker William’s work revisits the “classic period” of American film noir of the 1940s and ’50s – a low-key black and white style that has its roots in German expressionist cinematography. Based on hardboiled stories from pulp magazines that emerged during the Depression, the content of these urban “melodramas” typically revolve around flawed characters, alienated in some sense and trapped in unwanted situations. Associated with the social landscape of the era, they are often said to reflect a post-war cultural paranoia.

In these pieces, Parker William remixes film noir cinematography, using devices of disorientation such as tilted angle shots, and framing or cropping to partially obscure the subject, making the characters appear trapped within the frame. The use of starkly contrasting light and shadow gives the work a strong graphic quality that emphasises mood whilst creating a stylised distance.

we are here

Produced by… http://punch-records.co.uk/

1 ProTEST: FighT ThE PowEr

2 Parker william BAD MooN riSiNg

3 Cyril Mount PEACE oFFEriNgS

4 robert hope woNDErLAND

5 graham Martin ThE rEVoLUTioN iS hEALiNg

6 Tim Curtis, Schools Linking Network BrADForD CiTY PArK AMBASSADorS

1

1 1

1

2

2

3

4 4

4

5

5

6

5

1

2

6

5

1 3

REMIXNATIONART FOR THE PEOPLE, ART BY THE PEOPLE

it is only 10 years since wikipedia was set up but it’s hard to imagine a time without it. A collaborative community creation, free of advertising, free of charge, its growth sustained by individual donations… it continues to spread, inviting participation from everyone; or so its founder, Jimmy wales, asserts.

So what do we do with all this information and knowledge? how do we make sense of our highly mediated environment and how do we choose what to absorb and what to ignore?

we do what we always do: we filter the information, we modify the image, we re-interpret it and re-purpose it, adapting it according to changes in taste, times and intentions. The artists and artwork in this season’s programme show a variety of intentions and purposes: political, playful, activist, revolutionary, healing, questioning. They also re-interpret information and images to create a different view or way of looking at, understanding or reflecting on matters of interest or importance. Artists have been playing and experimenting like this for a long, long time but such “re-creativity” is accelerating today with pioneers like DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, whose mash-up or “re-mash” of material he describes thus: “Sampling is playfulness with memory; no one remembers anything exactly the same way. For 21st-century purposes anything goes. We are bombarded with masses of nothingness like a Bush speech.” For him, it is about creating a strong and interwoven pulse out of the chaos. “Nuanced complex engagement is beautiful. I hate America’s willingness to reduce everything to simple sound bites. A lot of your aesthetic is built on sound bites. But sampling is a collage. It creates more complexity.”

This season starts with a REMIXhibition in Richmond Atrium by Birmingham-based Punch, called Protest: Fight The Power, which draws on a unique collection of British Council protest and propaganda posters mixed with African posters and contemporary pieces by artists and designers working today. Students and staff will be involved in the planning and workshops for this exhibition at the University and we encourage people to join in by blogging it, taking part in the workshops and remixing the material.

In contrast, in the Atrium Restaurant, we have Parker William’s Bad Moon Rising. This is a collection of stylised, graphic, black and white reworkings in paint, of images taken from classic film noir stills. Trapped in time and frame, they resonate today against a climate of cuts and impending austerity.

At the beginning of March and to coincide with the annual Peace Laureate lecture and Peace Jam event, we will be showing paintings by artist Cyril Mount. Cyril’s experiences of active service in WWII are captured here and were the catalyst for a lifelong commitment to using his work to campaign for a better and more just world. His most recent series - re-purposing computer gaming iconography to emphasise the theatre of war - doesn’t pull any punches.

Where there is Hope there is light… and we lighten the mood in April by escaping into the world of Robert Hope, whose collages of childlike drawing and painterly sensitivity take us to real and imagined places. The DJ Spooky of the works-on-paper world, Robert Hope creates uncanny and quirky pieces that mix together autobiographical and cultural elements into pieces that leave you feeling better.

We finish off in Gallery II in June, with a return to revolutionary thoughts and an installation of work by Graham Martin – in response to Bradford – that revisits pioneering artist, Joseph Beuys’ notion of common wounds. The Revolution is Healing will see Graham return to Bradford to make work that addresses ideas of human hurt and togetherness, an extremely relevant and apposite area of concern for a city whose regeneration is undergoing a protracted time of transition in harsh economic times.

Cyril Mount | RUFFLING FEATHERS curated by Alison Darnbrough

4 – 25 March 2011 | Gallery IIExhibition Launch Thursday 3 March, 5 – 7pm

At the end of July 2010, twenty eight paintings and a number of drawings were donated to the Department of Peace Studies at the University by artist Cyril Mount.

“Cyril is a true peace activist: unrelenting in his commitment; powerful in expression; and often mischievous in action. We are honoured and delighted that Cyril has chosen to donate this body of work over many years to the University.” (Davina Miller, Head of Peace Studies)

Born in Liverpool, 1920, Mount was in active service in the Middle East and North African Campaigns and later in France, Holland and Germany. He made many drawings and gouache paintings in lulls between fighting and thirty nine of these are now in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum. Post war he became an art student for four years full time and then went on to teaching, mainly in Higher Education.

As a student in Liverpool, Mount was attracted to painters such as Breugel, Goya, Hogarth, Daumier and Picasso. He was greatly affected by Goya’s Horrors of War drawings which have fed into his art of the past decade or so. Mount comments: “The very act of drawing and painting still carries with it a strange but very real sort of magic… My feeling is that those of us blessed with this ability should, when necessary, use it to draw attention to the cruelty, injustices, horror and futility of war and ruffle the feathers of those responsible such as corrupt capitalism and religions. In my case I don’t feel I merit the title of peace activist, just the reformed enemy who saw and experienced far more than he bargained for when he ran away from the 1930s depression to join the regular Army and has since painted his reactions.” This exhibition of Mount’s paintings donated to the University of Bradford, is programmed to coincide with the 5th Annual Peace Jam event and Nobel Peace Laureate Public Lecture.

To mark the occasion, we will also be launching the start of our online archive of work in the University’s permanent art collection, with a more detailed record of Cyril Mount’s work.

For further details of this year’s Peace Jam events, go to: www.brad.ac.uk/acad/peacejam/

Robert Hope | WONDERLAND8 April – 27 May 2011 | Gallery II

Exhibition Launch Thursday 7 April, 5 – 7pm with special guest turn – poet, performer, painter and musical stand-up artist, the fabulous

Mik Artistik http://youtu.be/F83WCCf8RBQ

Robert Hope makes work that mixes structure and styles and handwriting to create scenes of half-remembered and half-imagined places and events. The results are an engaging series of magical, humorous, sad and quirky worlds, partially identifiable and partially mediated through a childlike fiction and borrowing from youth culture and autobiographical and art history connections. Over the top of sketchy surfaces, figures and objects are pasted and painted. Figures appear flat and as insubstantial as the painted environment/surface against which feelings and hopes might be projected.

3

4

EDUCATION AND LEARNING ACTIVITIESWe have a selection of artists who can deliver talks, workshops and residencies to schools, colleges and community groups, based around elements of our exhibition programme.

You can book a visit to the gallery for your school or community group, which includes an introduction to the exhibition.

We are also happy to discuss developing shorter and longer-term arts residencies and projects. If you are interested in visiting or just having a chat about how we can work with you, please get in touch with:

Caroline hick, Fellow in Visual Art: [email protected]