Whitworth After Hours

The Whitworth Art Gallery held one of it's regular After Hours events on Friday evening, featuring artists, musicians and poets responding to their Dark Matters Exhibition. I missed Butcher The Bar but photographed below are Adrian Slatcher presenting a selection of his poetry in front of Snow Mirror, We Are Willow - Part 3 performing a selection of their songs and ABC Artists' Andreas Schmidt, Jonathan Lewis and Mishka Henner creating a live, interactive digital piece entitled The Engine.

Dark Matters - Shadow, Technology, Art

An extensive look at the combining shadow, technology and art, Dark Matters at the Whitworth Art Gallery opens with the spectacular Snow Mirror, a fuzzy snowy backdrop which resolves itself into the ghost-like projections of the viewer before slowly dissipating as soon as you move.
Continuing onwards you find Peg Mirror from the same artist, Daniel Rozin, in which 650 wooden tiles twirl around to form a silhouette mirror of the viewer, their small motors whirring away quietly, sounding just like a swarm of bees. Both pieces reminded me a great deal of the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in their involvement of viewer in the artwork

Other excellent pieces include R. Luke DuBois’ video installation Kiss, Barnaby Hosking’s Black Flood & Thoughs (Butterflies) 1 and Moonlight off the Needles by unknown.
The work selected from the gallery’s own collection to accompany this exhibition is also of a high standard. I especially liked Anthony Gormley’s print Untitled (asshole), with black lines streaming the page from it’s central point.
Also to be found in the Mezzanine Court is Brass Art’s otherworldly Still Life No.1, in which a number of small figurines have been placed on a circular table in a dark room, covered in cellophane and are illuminated by a constantly moving light causing shadowy characters to drift along the gallery walls.
The exhibition runs until January 15th 2012. Go and see it.

The Forked Forest Path

Olafur Eliasson has created a incredibly fairytale-like installation within the Whitworth Art Gallery as part of the The Land Between Us exhibition. Go, see and experience it.

H Hawkline at the Whitworth

H Hawkline in support of Gruff Rhys.

Gruff Rhys at the Whitworth

Gruff Rhys performing at the Whitworth Art Gallery. T'was a most unusual and wonderful performance of 2 halves - the first acoustic, the second (spectacularly shambolic) electronic with a "chat show" entitled Sitars in their Eyes slotted in-between. Andy Votel came on for a music quiz and Jane Weaver performed a song. Not your average gig then. And I've still got "Singing a song in the morning. Singing it again at night..." stuck in my head.

Subversive Spaces, Whitworth Art Gallery

I originally visited the Subversive Spaces exhibition on the same weekend as the taking part in Ardwick Heritage Trail so I’m writing most of this from notes I took at the time.

Located towards the back of Whitworth’s ground floor, you’re initially greeted by the phallic furniture of Sarah Lucas’ The Pleasure Principle, a particularly striking piece of work based upon Freudian theory – one of the original Surrealists main inspirations. This is one of the main themes of the exhibition as old and new works are mixed together with modern artists bring their own take on the Surrealist’s ideas. Not all of them are successful – I found Lucy Ganning’s Climbing Round My Room reminded me of a Monty Python sketch more than anything else (this is it it from 3.45 onwards).

The exhibition is divided into two halves – the first focusing on how our interior lives are affected by the world around us with the second is the opposite – how we affect and interact with the world around us. Splitting the two is Francis Alÿs’ Railings videos, which feature him wandering the streets of a city with a drum-stick in hand to create a rhythm and beat to his walk (when he’s not setting off car alarms).

I prefer the second half myself, which features such pieces as Marie-Anye Guilleminot’s video Nuit Blanche (White or sleepless night) features her as a ghostly figure clad in white haunting the night streets of Bilbao, it’s soundtrack eerily reminiscent of a John Carpenter horror film. There’s also Runier Ganahl’s death-defying Bicycling Broadway video, in which he ride against the flow of traffic in central New York with no hands on the handlebars.

Subversive Spaces is running at the Whitworth Art Gallery until May 4th so if you have the time, I recommend heading on down for a visit.

Ardwick Heritage Walk

A few weeks back I made my way over to Victoria Park for guided tour of Ardwick. This was the 2nd of two pilot walks with a blue-badge guide, with the scheme starting up properly later this year as part of wider plan to encourage people to visit the area.

It was a pleasant couple of hours, visiting first the First Church of Christ Scientist (no relation to Scientology), followed by a short stroll over to the Victoria Baths. If you've never been, I highly recommend a visit as it's facinating place to explore. We then trooped on over to another building (which I can't remember at the moment and forgot to photograph), where the history of the area was detailed and then onto the Whitworth gallery for a well-deserved cup of tea (well, for everyone else - me being a non-tea drinker, I had myself some organic Dandelion & Burdock. Yum).

There isn't currently a website for the summer walks as it's still under construction, but I'll post an update as and when it's all up and running.