The City Gallery Exhibition Archive 1

Clearly a Bag

Jo Cope

24 January - 21 March 2009

Jo Cope is a designer with a fashion background exploring radical new approaches to the relationship between clothes, accessories and the wearer.

Previous clients range from Topshop to the V&A and this broad approach has kept her at the cutting edge of fashion and product design. This exhibition takes, as its starting point, the idea of the handbag. Luxury market fashion companies have two key products that generate the majority of their profits - fragrances and handbags. Cope has created a new design for the humble handbag that radically re-evaluates what it can look like.

For The City Gallery, Cope has ssembled 250 of her Perspex handbags into a large-scale installation, an inspired minimalist sculpture of the twentieth century. Cope suggests that the work inspires the viewer into ‘looking beyond what they already know, in order to see differently’.

Collecting a Kaleidoscope

24 January - 21 March 2009

Collecting a Kaleidoscope is an exhibition of 20 objects from the Crafts Council Collection selected by Ralph Turner, renowned curator, writer and former Head of Exhibitions at the Crafts Council from 1979-1989.


Ralph Turner’s love of craft started during a childhood in a Welsh coalmining town where the handmade was a necessary part of everyday life. He believes craft offers a timely antidote to our current global culture. Through his very personal selection from a public collection we are offered an insight into the diverse and unique nature of contemporary craft and the breadth and depth of an exceptional public collection.

The objects in Collecting a Kaleidoscope range across disciplines and include ephemeral pieces of jewellery by Naomi Filmer that melt upon the wearer, Bruno Romanelli’s serene spectral glass portrait and Alison Britton’s solid vessel Gob. The pure, quiet lines of Shin Azumi’s bench and Elizabeth Callinicos’ methodical and intriguing Group of Objects contrast with the raw energy of Simon Carroll’s anarchic thrown pot and further accentuate the vibrancy and range of this selection.

Collecting a Kaleidoscope is a part of the Crafts Council Touring Exhibition initiative that offers museums and galleries the opportunity to host innovative curated exhibitions showcasing the Crafts Council Collection.

For a selection of objects featured in the exhibition visit the Image Gallery.

The Hitcher
Chris Coekin
4 April - 6 June 2009

The image of the lone traveller hitch-hiking across the country has preoccupied the twentieth century imagination, perhaps most famously in the American beat writer Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road.

Chris Coekin begins his journey on the 88 Bus from the Monmouth Drive terminal of the Eyres Monsell estate. He is looking for liberty and the open road, but finds that they are wonderful myths rather than the reality of the experience.

In this exhibition Coekin displays a series of photographs of himself on the road, portraits of those whom gave him lifts and the cards bearing the names of destinations. The photographs vary from rough and ready snapshots to much more formal portraiture and they capture a particular idea of Englishness, of masculinity and of freedom.

The exhibition is both a celebration and a deconstruction of the myths of hitchhiking and the way in which Kerouac’s novel has played in the imagination of the English.

Chris Coekin was born in Leicester in 1967 and this is his first exhibition in his hometown since 2000.

For a selection of photographs featured in the exhibition visit the Image Gallery.

The Hitcher by Chris Coekin published by Walkout Books is available in the gallery shop priced at a special exhibition price of £15.00.

The Hitcher was originally commissioned by The Photographers Gallery

Mo’Lasses IV

Philomena Francis

4 April - 6 June 2009

Philomena Francis creates astonishing installations based around treacle wall drawings.





These drawings, hovering between figuration and abstraction, explore the experience of black women in contemporary society.

Her work draws on a variety of colonial and popular reference points to illustrate the ways in which the black female body is understood in the twenty-first century. Brown sugar has connotations of black female sexuality in popular culture and historically sugar, from which treacle is derived, played a vital economic role in the slave trade. The paints that she uses refer to the Georgian middle classes who drove the sugar industry.

Through these reference points she suggests the complexity and contradictions of black female identity in contemporary society. She is also interested in pushing beyond the traditions of drawing and painting by moving into a much more immediate, sensory realm. The treacle fills the space with its wonderful, tainted aroma and is powerfully evocative.

Pattern Recognition

20 June - 24 October 2009

The City Gallery

Philip Allen, Rana Begum, boredomresearch, Pogus Caeser, Layla Curtis, Penny Davis, Graham Dolphin, Dryden Goodwin, Martin Fletcher Systems House, Lesley Halliwell, Andy Harper, Gemma Holt, Aisha Khalid, Bernard Leach, Edwin Li, Roy Lichtenstein, Max Mosscrop, Eduardo Palozzi, Hetain Patel, Abigail Reynolds, Lucy Rie, Bridget Riley, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Kim Rugg, Mahbub Shah, Conrad Shawcross, Robert Smithson, Alison Turnbull, Victor Vasarely, David Watkins, Carey Young.

The artists in this exhibition are all exploring the point at which patterns begin to emerge or where they start to disintegrate. The starting point is Robert Smithson’s Film ‘Spiral Jetty’ documenting his famed land artwork.

In 1970 he built a large circling promenade in the shape of a spiral into the Great Utah lake in the United States. This is his film documenting the process. The jetty disappeared beneath a rising lake Utah in 1972 and then remerged in 2002.

This process of emergence and disappearance of pattern can be seen throughout the art works in the exhibition. This tracking of pattern has been a key motif of Islamic arts and, and though it has become the driving force behind social sciences, marketing, social planning and politics, the idea of pattern has remained problematic in the visual arts.

The artists in the exhibition employ pattern in a wide variety of ways from the highly decorative work of Victor Vasserely to the more cerebral work of Carey Young.

The artists Andy Harpur, Alison Turnbull and Aisha Khalid all employ different approaches to paint to uncover and disrupt patterns in nature and culture. Mahbub Shah, Kim Rugg, and Abigail Reynolds each employ collage in different ways to draw out hidden social and historical patterns.

The filmmaker Edwin Li quotes 1930s and their interest film-makers and their interest in feedback patterns and disrupts this with the light hearted intrusion of a dog.

The photographer Dryden Goodwin scratches into his photographs to suggest the patterns that are in play during drawing and facial recognition and Graham Dolphin scratches language into found posters suggesting new correlations between text and image.

These diverse artists shift explore pattern not as something that lies on the surface but as the structure that lies beneath.

Images:

Gemma Holt, ‘Carpet’ 2008 ©The artist.
Courtesy the artist and Limoncello, London

Carey Young, Terms and Conditions 2004 ©Carey Young.
Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery

Max Mosscrop, What's Happening Happening, 2007©The artist
Courtesy of the artist

The Guardian Guide: Exhibtions Preview 
27 June 2009

The Guardian Exhibitionist: The best art shows to see this week
19 June 2009

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EXHIBITION HAS NOW CLOSED