REW-SHAY

Prepare your goodbye’s…

SO, looks like Mr Ruscha’s work will be leaving us very shortly! I am actually gutted - I’m really going to miss his work brightening up the walls of the Pop and Northern Ireland galleries. 

It will be a said good bye, but one we hope will have a legacy. I hope as many people as possible managed to see the exhibit, and if you haven’t then why not come and see for yourself what the fuss is all about? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I LOVE IT.

Admittedly I wasn’t that taken by the work originally, but I changed my mind after taking a closer look. I love it. I really do. The colours, the lexis, the general beauty of a contemporary master piece…

Let me know what you think - I know there are a massive variety of opinions on the work.

Talk soon,

Tegan 

Ruscha Soundscapes

Last week marked the beginning of a Ruscha-inspired journey into sound.  Working with sound artist… composer… musician Duncan Chapman, Ruscha works provided the starting point for a sonic exploration… perhaps into Ruscha’s hyper-real landscapes, into his ideas and concerns or as a juxtaposition to his pieces.  Who knows where the project will lead us?

Duncan works on all kinds of sound projects from rhubarb to semaphore, field recordings to invented instruments… what a curious, questioning and inspirational artist we found him to be.

Here’s a taster of what we’ve created so far… to be followed up by two more days with Duncan later in the year:

http://www.duncanchapman.org/present/in-response-to-ruscha/

Word Cloud Project

So… there’s a project going on this week to do with the exhibition. Basically, we’re encouraging members of the public to come along and create their own piece of art inspired by Mr. Ruscha - it’s great fun so come along and take part! Make your way to the gallery, visit the exhibit, then ask about the project.

Tomorrow’s the last day!

Tegan 

Southampton visit

Whilst at Southampton City Art Gallery we led a Warhol workshop in their dedicated ‘Factory’ space.  Wolverhampton showed the Warhol Artist Room in 2009 so we had lots of ideas and experiences to share with the young people at Southampton.

We made Warhol-esque badges and used digital photography to create portraits which we then manipulated in a Warhol style using collage materials.  It was a great opportunity to meet young people and staff at the Southampton venues and get an overview of the Artist Rooms project.  There’s always Artist Rooms activity going on somewhere in the country so it was great to be part of ‘the bigger picture’. 

It was especially interesting to see the curatorial decisions that had been made at the Southampton Galleries and the similarities and differences to the display we had in Wovlerhampton in 2009.  Warhol’s work looked different in this different environment and we saw works that hadn’t been displayed in Wolevrhampton which gave us a deeper insight into Warhol’s practice.