Big Nothing
Big Nothing Exhibition – MAW 2017
During the first ever Middlesbrough Art Week I was working alongside the organisers to develop the spaces as well as working as a photographer for the event. I was offered the chance to exhibit some work as part of the exhibition in the ‘House of Blah Blah’ exhibition space alongside Gemma Tierney and K-Bird, two fellow artists working on the exhibition setup who were doing their Fine Art degrees when I was doing my MA.
We worked together to develop and exhibition that showcased each of our current work while trying to find a common ground between our different practices. The resulting exhibition played with light and site specific installations to transform the space in to an immersive experience where each piece not only added to, but also played with, the other pieces within the space through the use of light and reflection in an ever changing space that would allow the each viewer to experience it differently depending on their position within the space and/or the time in which they entered
My work consisted of a site specific installation created using welding magnets and parts of an old trampoline alongside digitally manipulated 1940’s mugshots. The shapes and colours from these mugshots was then reflected within two video pieces that I had included within the show – ‘Sandwich’ a looping video of woman on a bus on her way to a Black Rights march in the 60’s taking a bite of a sandwich, where each frame was individually manipulated and added to with colours and shapes – their frantic changes in colour and position meant as a reflection of the chaos of emotions and thoughts going through the young women’s head behind the calm exterior portrayed within the clip – and ‘March’ a similarly treated video clip of soldiers from World War 2 walking along the road, either to or from a battle. Both clips were found online via royalty free stock files, and originally fully in Black and white.
The final piece was an installation of white gloss tiles that were positioned upon the floor in the space to act as an alternative viewing point of the pieces around them, distorting their view and reflecting the colours and lights from both my own and the artists works that were in the space.
