Kaw Záysh'n Exhibition At The New Art Gallery Walsall - until 5 July
Date Published : 02 July 2009
Final major art works by Walsall College HND Fine Art students presenting systems of cause and effect.
This exhibition invites responses from the viewer on the purpose and function of art.
Alex Fawson’s work depicts the five most popular choices to the question, “If you could invite five famous people (alive or dead) to a dinner party, who would they be?”. After an extensive survey to the question, Alex has created a painting depicting the five most popular persons. Painted in a style that references the theatrical and dramatic paintings of the Renaissance, the overall intention is to examine the social trend and current celebrity climate in relation to world history.
Rachel Fenemer’s interactive screen-based video works reveal the intimate aspects of lived experiences. Her films were constructed using footage of members of her family expressing their reactions, and more importantly emotions, towards pieces of music they have a nostalgic connection to. The work explores the safety and familiarity of nostalgic behaviour in a domestic setting.
Jodie Guest has created a slide show of images taken from old photographs of her extended family that she has manipulated to give a different presentation of the past. As she has no emotional connection with the images themselves and by putting herself into the situation, they begin to trigger emotions which remind her of her own experiences of family life.
Jodie Payne will be inviting people into her greenhouse situated on the 4th floor of the gallery. Visitors may be surprised that instead of growing plants she will be slowly killing them with salt. Salt is a well known food preservative and is essential to animal life, but toxic to most plants. The destruction of the plants through the process of the addition of salt is poignant, but happiness never really dies, it just exists in another form.
Natalie Rix will be exploring how ‘dirt’ can be glamorised by experimenting with rubbish that she has picked up off the street and transforming them into beautiful objects of art that viewers will find hard to believe started from the bin. Expensive paints and brilliant sheens are used to create an illusion of worth and value placed onto the items.
Ian Simkin’s work is all about the pressures an artist faces when comparing oneself to the great artists of the past and present. His installation includes blown up details of some of the best known paintings taken from historically important moments in the life story of painting. The sheer scale of the work will give the viewer a feeling of confinement and a sense of the immense weight of history that informs and possibly intimidates anyone putting brush to canvas.
Steven Stanton has created a “swarm” of cats that will be overtaking the gallery. He explores the relationship and tension between systems of power, hierarchy and their eventual control and corruption through the use of the semantics and semiotics of visual culture, by taking images which are normally overlooked due to cultural reasoning and conditioning, and then reintroducing them into a gallery setting.