Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Various venues, Ipswich
7-21 May
Reviewed by: Ivor Southwood
‘Open 2 Art’ is a series of thirteen works by artists collaborating with charities, whose shops in Ipswich town centre host most of the exhibits. The artists’ recycling of discarded materials reflects a celebration of people who might otherwise feel rejected as obsolete, faulty, used up; and the bricolage emerging from the bric-a-brac in these second-hand spaces aims to catch the attention of the casual browser.
Many of the artworks can be read as coded expressions of traumatic events, such as depression, homelessness or cancer, and reflect the balance which the charities have to maintain between the needs of their affected groups and image-friendly PR. So there is the mental dislocation of Ramon Sheppard’s Something’s Not Right, a diagonal video installation (in the YMCA shop) showing a tap overfilling a jug with water, split across two portable televisions unevenly stacked on donated books, and Mark Lander’s untitled painting in the Samaritans shop window, an abstract pale blue-green canvas through which the viewer is drawn into the static non-place of the grief-stricken caller. Both these pieces suggest the everyday world of relationships being somehow submerged or screened out. Elsewhere, in the café-based Happy Birthday I-XIII by Jay Miller (representing East Anglian Children’s Hospices), half-melted candles and notebooks smudged by burnt matches keep a vigil over the customers’ small tables, reminders of the fragility of life.
Most powerfully, the nine deceptively light rectangles of fabric hung from the ceiling of the Cancer Research shop in Louise Nicholls’ Awareness can be seen as clinical sections of skin. Eight are painted white, but one is scarred pink, a mastectomised body torn apart by disease (one in nine women is likely to suffer from breast cancer). The artwork is a decoration for the survivors of this terror inflicted upon them arbitrarily by their own bodies.
Writer detail:
Ivor Southwood
ivor.southwood@btinternet.com |
Venue detail:
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