Today I went to the Firstsite's Open Exhibition in Colchester town. Great initiative of local gallery, which collected over seven hundred artworks from across the East of England, creating a friendly platform for emerging, practising and aspiring artists and building creative community.
Rather convenient location (at least for local people), free admission and promoting talent from the region, makes it an encouraging place to visit.
The exhibition consists of a wide range of different topics, disciplines and approaches. It also encourages people to take an active role in the creative processes by offering an activity leaflet, visitors to give their feedback. It tries to engage people with art a little bit more and it shows that art can be for anybody. For example, there was a section presenting work of children and young people.
It's possibly a little bit overloaded with the amount of art pieces... However it tells a great story, it becomes a good piece of history and a research source.
I overheard a complain of couple of ladies about the signage. I agree there was very little information about each artwork, it was really basic: name of the author, title of work and a year o creation. However with how many works needed to be displayed I think it works fine. I think there should be a catalogue of all of the for a review if required from any visitors. There could also be a few generic information boards for each section. Each section displayed individually numbered artworks.
I was particularly interested in what's displayed on the walls, for instance: photography, paintings, drawings or collages. Besides there were some installations and three-dimensional works, sculptures and video installation. They were positioned all over the place, on the tables and on the floors (some photographs attached below).
In the heart of this exhibition there was a room with a big wall projection showing ''15 seconds part 3'' (2014) by Chris Dorley-Brown. I found it a bit weird at first, as I got to watch it before reading the information board (placed outside the room in this particular case). In 1994, several hundred schoolchildren were invited to make video portraits of themselves and experience ''15 seconds of fame''. All for people born in and around Colchester in 1980s. In 2004 and 2014 Dorley-Brown followed the project with its further continuation, showing life of participants in progress; growing up process, discovering our ambitions and what makes us happy. He presented all three parts of each video portrait at once, in the same time, creating a whole of the speeches and behaviours for each individual person. Beautiful project.
Below I have put together a mini gallery, a sort of my own 'mood board' for inspirations and preferences from the place; a visual feedback recorded while visiting. There are also two or three works I have decided to place here because of their lack of aesthetics I notice, for instance: shades of pink paint on canvas, handmade monster in shoes or pizza box with take away accessories and changes in packaging information.
Plenty of lovely landscapes, like one just underneath here, a lot of interesting collages and photographs. Good experience! In my opinion it's an important and very necessary element in building local creative communities.
Picture Gallery
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