Whitworth Art Gallery
As a designer I don’t find art gallery’s as inspirational as others, I don’t find the work relatable however there were some key pieces in this gallery that did catch my eye. a sham kid piece, as you walked down the hall a long wall was covered in photographs all fit together, different sizes, initially I wondered who these people are, what they were doing and what relation they had to each other, it looked like a family or a story perhaps, the images were black and white even though the images looked recent.
At closer look into this piece, it was a story about a group of designers that went on holiday every year together, the idea behind it was that everyone will get different interpretations from this, they will decide whether they think its a family or friend, whether their old or new. Or what emotions they get from the pictures, the black and white colour makes them all a blank canvas for emotion. The look on peoples faces, the way they look, how they are positioned, what they are wearing. All these things contribute to what we get out of this piece.
The way we interpret art and design is what really interest me, which is why I think this caught my eye, its about storytelling and showing a narrative that the audience constructs, in my own work I have done this in a conversation brief though how people see themselves and others and I have also took a storytelling course online t enhance my skills, because I think in design its a vital skill.
A piece gathering of strangers by Nathan Cooley was one that I didn’t notice as art before our seminar this morning, as I was sat in the canteen I saw an illuminated sign 'gathering of strangers'. The idea was that the sign changed meaning when put into different context. On top of the Whitworth gallery it shows the gathering of all different kinds f people from different places and backgrounds coming together for a common interest. The idea of context is not something you would know from this piece without researching deeper into the artist. Below are some more paces this piece has been....
I then entered a room that was all about feminism, this wasn’t apparent unless you looked deeper into the pieces around you, a piece that caught my eye was called rainbow girls, initially it caught my eye because it was a typography piece and that is something that I like the look of a lot, I like the diversity and meaning behind type, at a closer look I saw that the type had embroidery entwined within it, the artist has adopted embroidery as a subversive medium because the piece is all about gender and Islamic culture, it represents how women would stay at home and knit and this would help them stay out of the mans way, the stereotype of women years ago, the significance is the script through Islamic art but the phrases are from feminist texts.
There was a huge installation piece in one of the rooms that caught my eye instantly, the room was dark and in the middle a green house was glowing, but the green house had frosted panels with quotes written on them, the light glowing from within. The piece was called feminist green house by Mary Kelly, the thought that a shed is a male domain the piece makes the shed look beautiful and angelic through the use of light, the phrases were all from feminist texts, the quotations on their own may not make sense, but as a whole they create a narrative, a lot like the sham kid photo wall I talked about earlier.
