Show 1: Black

07.08.2010 – 15.08.2010

Artists

Max Slaven, Claire Biddles, Victoria McDonald, Jonathan Long, Rachel Maclean, Jennifer Macgregor, Zachery Sell, Fiona Gordon.

Show 2: White

21.08.2010 – 29.08.2010

Artists

Juliet Fellows-Smith, Sarah Wright, Natalie Feather, Desmond Church, Ellie Royle, Ralph Mackenzie, Jamie Carter, Ian McGee, Brian Dickson, Lucy Macpherson, Shaun O’Donnell.

David Dale Gallery & Studios’ two-part members show will be an annual occasion of curated exhibitions of studio artists’ work. The forthcoming exhibitions are the first of this annual event.
The aim of these exhibitions is to move away from the typically crowded salon style of member’s shows common to many organisations, into a curated showcase of new work by studio artists.
For 2010, the exhibitions will be dictated by the brief, “Black” and “White”. The artists were asked to choose and then respond to each word in whatever manner they saw fit, be it literal or conceptual. The thematic terms of Black/ White were chosen to curatorially drive the exhibitions because of their simplicity, however, the connotations of the words as signifiers are suitably vast to encompass the working practise of every artist.
Curatorially, each show has taken a natural course in the division of mediums. The exhibitions will take their cue from the delineation of the contemporary art space along medium specific grounds, the tension between the black box (film) and the white cube (the modernist gallery)¹.

Consequently, Black (Show 1) is primarily film and installation based, for example: Jonathon Long’s dark and brooding stop frame animation film work and sound installation; Victoria McDonald’s unnerving entomological sculptural installation; Rachel Maclean’s characteristically sardonic and black humoured films; and Maximilian Slaven’s gallery intervention which usurps the usually invisible furniture of filmic black box (the curtain) and makes it the impotent focal point.

White (Show 2), has a greater focus on the two-dimensional use of the ‘white cube’ gallery space, for example: Natalie Feather’s subtle and enigmatic photography; Juliet Fellows-Smith’s washed out painting on paper which comment on post – war bread advertisements in the west; Ralph Mackenzie’s wall based light box, which looks at the RGB make up of white through the obsolete medium of the ZX Spectrum; and Ellie Royle’s digital print of a single sheet of Somerset paper printed 1:1, explores the CMYK base of all printing methods, which taken to its zenith renders white a purely abstract concept.

¹ Mark Nash, ‘Auditorium: A theatre for learning’, in A Manual: For the 21st Century Art Institution, p.135

Show 1: Black

Artists:

Show 2: White

Artists: