Alternative Gallery Tour with Harry Hill
With the current Cornerhouse exhibition – David Shrigley’s HOW ARE YOU FEELING? – being very much focussed upon participation, it was the ideal opportunity to return to last year’s successful format of an alternative gallery tour with someone able to cast a fresh light upon the work on display. Barbara Nice would be a tough act to follow, her seemingly clueless but ultimately sharp-as-a-tack schtick having gone down a storm as she equipped visitors with feather dusters and requested they keep an eye out for mucky pictures taken during her glamour modelling days.
Top Bunk! coming soon
A Cornerhouse Projects exhibition featuring limited edition prints and original work from The Hammo, John Powell-Jones, Gemma Parker, Simon Misra, David Bailey, Tasha Whittle, Adam Cadwell and Bryony Jackson.
Cornerhouse café-bar, Fri 12 October – Tue 13th November 2012
Artists don’t tumble from moulds in institutions, the innate spark is not taught but fanned to life beneath catalogue-bought duvet sets and candlewick throws. Sprawled across the floor or hunched over a hand-me-down desk, doodles become sketches, words become poems, wild imaginings scurry for shelter at the back of the wardrobe; soft, pink and glistening, yet to form a hard shell to deflect the criticism that awaits.
Top Bunk! is a Cornerhouse Projects exhibition that seeks to capture the spark of enthusiasm before it bends to fit the restrictive moulds that await; from academia to peer review and the cost of living. No subject is unsuited, no method discouraged. A range of responses include wistful juvenilia, rampaging robots, melancholia, psychedelic daydreams, teen-fan adulation, the allure of adulthood and beginning of sexual fruition.
Timed to coincide with Year 2 of our successful Sketch-O-Matic residency (Fri 12 – Sun 21 Oct), the artists are drawn from previous participants and new recruits. Just as this highlights the exchange of coin for the creative act, placing the sitter in the position of both artist and muse, so Top Bunk! has been purposely designed to offer affordable* limited prints. None are guaranteed to increase in value, but you will be supporting local talent.
If our worlds began in our bedroom and have now bled to encompass our homes, then our domiciles call out for totems, talismans and triggers: visual stimuli that extend beyond album choices, fashion picks and furnishings. The wish is that the pictures on display say something unique about both who drew them and who subsequently chooses them, just as we once plastered our dens, gang-huts and boudoirs without thought for the opinion of others.
*around £50 – £100
Curated by Bren O’Callaghan and Gemma Parker
David Shrigley life class drop-in
Last night was the first of x3 drop-in sessions for the public to have a go at drawing David Shrigley’s ‘The Life Model’. The artist was still adding eyelashes an hour before opening but after lifting ‘him’ into position and adding a rather fabulous wig, and connecting the arduino board and power for animatronic action, he was blinking and pissing into a bucket in no time. First through the doors was a huge group of students from the Visual Art Society at MMU, followed by a herd of public, so many that we had almost 100 people in the gallery. The drawing materials table was completely blitzed (actually quite pleased about this, I love shopping for art materials/stationery so this is the perfect excuse to hit-up Fred Aldous today), and dozens upon dozens of illustrations and sketches were produced that will be added to the walls in time for the exhibition opening on Friday 12 Oct. Sessions continue tonight, Tue 2 Oct and tomorrow, Wed 3 Oct from 18.00 – 19.00.