Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
The Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon 25 February – 7 April
Reviewed by: Michael Stanley
For nearly ten years now artists Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio have made a career from other people's stories. Working closely with a range of different audiences and within a variety of social contexts, these stories of the everyday and the commonplace have been mediated through a prolific frenzy of animated videos, poster campaigns, TV broadcasts and most commonly through specially published comic books.
The exhibition at The Gallery, Stratford provides an opportunity to indulge in a mini-retrospective of a practice that explores the questions posed by collaborative working and the role of audience as producer, distributor and arbiter of the work.
A number of key projects figure in the exhibition: Workers Make the Candy of Their Dreams – factory workers at a Nestlé plant in Chicago collaborated with the artists to produce 120,000 chocolate bars – and The Hand and the Word, an animated video recently commissioned by BALTIC and scripted with an amateur theatre company in Gateshead. These projects provide the backdrop for a new commission for Stratford, Talk of the Town, in which the artists have teamed up with the Stratford Journal to solicit stories from local residents. Working with a selected audience the stories have been re-packaged as comic strips, appearing as a series in the newspaper throughout March and April. Painfully banal, they make a somewhat tired attempt to fetishise the mundanity of everyday events: a mother falls from her bicycle, a flasher drops his trousers and a child bumps into a famous actor. Despite these stories being drawn from the specific cultures of Stratford, Leigh or Preston, they remain hopelessly generic, revealing little insight into place and context and subverting the notion of site-specificity itself.
Writer detail:
MICHAEL STANLEY
is a curator.
Venue detail:
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