Art & Audience

This is the beginning of the Art & Audience unit, the final unit of my second year.
We have got together in groups and began talking about what we want out of our end of year show. The idea that brought us together was the theme  of 'transience'. We all chose thus for different reasons, for some it was the work itself that has themes of temporality, time and change be it conceptual and metaphorical or in terms of the medium - for example the act of creating a work being ongoing and ever changing. However others were drawn to the theme with ideas of what they would like out of an exhibition, where it is the show itself that is impermanent.

For me, it was a combination of the two. My source material is advertising publication, from which the images are ever-changing and very temporary. Advertisers have to be constantly creating new images constantly to keep up with audiences and changing times and trends. I was also interested in the idea of a show being un-traditional and alternative in the way that it could be very short-lived and maybe altered, rather than having a normal launch night and it lasting a certain amount of time.

A group of ten of both painting and sculpture students ended up splitting into town groups because of the logistics - a big group would have been hard to organise and to satisfy everybody. So the group I have decided to show with are a group of 5 painting and print-making students, with similar ideas about a show surrounding a topic but the themes of the work exploring it in different ways, interpreting the theme differently and in various media.

We realised that choosing and finding a location for the show is the most important first step. We liked the idea of the building we show in linking to the theme, either being a temporary building or structure, or it being in some sort of transition or change itself - this helping build on the idea of the show and the work being temporary and a transition into something new. This is where the idea came from to use an empty or derelict building, and especially an empty shop. We would quite like to have window spaces, partly for the natural light, and partly for the possibility of showing in the window space itself. This would be ideal for my work, it being on public display rather than just inside the exhibition, considering it is concerned with advertising psychology.

We have a few leads that we hope will help us find our ideal location - an artists collective who often use empty buildings an non-art exhibition spaces; existing friends that may be able to lend their ex-retail space, and links to the council and people in the know about empty buildings.