Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Touchstones, Rochdale
28 January – 19 March
Reviewed by: Mike Dawson
Three artists, Jason Minsky, Beryl Graham and Maria Bracken, have been chosen to join forces to transform the Touchstones main gallery into a ‘Games Room’. The rationale for the show is to examine the relation between art and entertainment, and one artist who excels in this area is Jason Minsky. Continuing his energetic and interdisciplinary practice, whilst the scale may be less ambitious than Get In, Get Out (Crosby Home Art Prize 2004), the plethora of works isn’t. Minsky’s Daydreamer, sees floor vinyl that recall lines drawn to create boundaries for sports games and The Object of My Aim where various sports balls have been cast to create other worldly sculpture. Other works by Minsky include a wall and floor sculpture made out of board games, and a modern day ‘Knur and Spel’ (often called a poor man’s golf). Minsky’s work here plays and exposes the crossover of sport, art and their cultural readings.
Bouncing off cultural readings and sitting between Minsky’s and Graham’s work is the undergraduate artist Maria Bracken. Braken’s Zoetrope (or wheel of life) is an interactive sculpture, with a recycled bicycle wheel used to support a slit drum that animates photographs of friends and family doing repetitive actions.
Beryl Graham, known more for her complex interactive media works has opted for Paper Games, a body of work she’s been exploring since 1998. Here she looks at the ‘game with no name’ (‘Cootie Catcher’ in the US), creating an interactive play area and large-scale versions (in museum cases) of this fortune-telling paper game from the playground.
Whilst ‘The Games Room’ exhibition has set out to undertake a particular curatorial remit, overall the selection of artists is playfully nebulous; yet unwittingly it has created a dynamically evocative and nostalgic show.
Writer detail:
Mike Chavez-Dawson is an interdisciplinary performance artist.
Venue detail:
Touchstones
Arts & Heritage Centre, The Esplanade, ROCHDALE OL16 1AQ
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