What's On at the Cooper Gallery

 

Summer Sale!

 

 

From Saturday the 20th of July to Saturday the 3rd of August the Cooper Art Gallery is having a summer sale, where everything is under a £100!

 

 

The Summer Sale has some really good stuff in it, then again it also has some really bad over priced stuff that I could do at the age of seven. So, if you are interested in art get your butt down there before all the good stuff is gone. There are a range of works from paintings to pottery to jewellery.

 

 

How to get there

 

 

 

 

Stories from Café De Galata

Café De Galata is one of the Cooper Gallery's current exhibitions. It is an installation piece inspired by the painting 'Café De Galata' by Charles Theodore Frere. It is meant to replicate to some extent a bustling Turkish café in Constantinople, however as you can see it is rather sparse. Conceptually it is very good and I think guests would have really enjoyed it if it had a lot more things in. When I imagine a Turkish café, I expect it to be full of cushions of different shapes and sizes, never two being the same. I expect to smell herbs and spices, hear running water from a fountain and see lots of drapes and curtains. However there is music records of a Turkish market place which I think gives the work an extra dimension which it really benefits from.The cafes main function is a child's story telling area, where on Saturdays there are workshops and story telling sessions at 10am, 11:30am and 2pm. Which I hear is quite good, so it you want to get rid of your kids for an hour or two there's the place to go.

But this is just personal taste, don't let it stop you from visiting. The exhibition runs till the 31st August. that's plenty of time left to take a peek, visit the summer sales and have a look at the other exhibition, Streets of Barnsley or is it Barnsley Streets. I can't remember.

Sheffield Hallam Creative Art Practice Degree Show 2013 - Constellation

Constellation is part of the Creative Spark Exhibition 2013 and unveils works by Sheffield Hallam University’s Creative Art Practice graduate students. The works displayed covers a range of different mediums, including painting, photography, video based work, craft and much, much more. The show opens to the public from the 8th of June until the 23rd of June, 10am while 4pm Monday to Saturday. We are located at Arundel Gate Court, 175 Arundel Gate, City Campus, Sheffield, S1 2LQ. To see our work please visit our website at http://www.constellationsheffield.com/

How to find us

Here are a couple of my Video Stills

Sleeping Beauty

Hi guys. Sorry I haven't posted anything for a while I have been busy with degree show and stuff. Here is a photo-shoot I did with Georgina, it must have been one of the easiest shoots I have done with her, because all she had to do was sleep. I think she might have actually fallen asleep at one point too.

Red Riding Hood

Poor Georgina had to walk around in the freezing cold in November for me for this photoshoot. Thankyou Georgina.



Victorian Governess

I did this photoshoot a while ago but didn't get around to posting it.

Indian Woman

 



Here is another one of my photo-shoots. I really like tradiontal indian clothing, it is so colourful and full of intricately beautiful patterns. Granted I didn't have a real sari I just used a large scarf and I think it works quite well.

 

Emma, Lady Hamilton

It's been a while since I uploaded any of my photography work, don't know why, guess I just forgot about it. Well I have remembered it now. This is another of my recreations of a portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton, painted by George Romney. I didn't know much about Lady Hamilton when I decided to do the recreation but I have just discovered she was the mistress of Horatio Nelson, who knew, right. Clearly not me. Granted they are not that accurate but I got carried away with how beautiful Georgina looked I just started doing my own thing instead.

Miscellaneous

I love that word, I think it is just so cool. Any who, here is a little collection of indiviual drawings I grouped together.

Ace Attorney

 

I happen to be a fan of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney and as tribute I thought I would do a little picture of the gang together.

Comics

No matter what I am doing in my practice I eventually get bored and go back to drawing. I have always wanted to have a go at drawing manga, but I have never quite gotten around to it until now. After doing alot of copying and watching Mark Crilley's youtube channel to hone in my skills I felt confident enough to have a go at drawing some comics from scratch. These comics are a documentary of all the funny stuff my sister has done in real life.

Gravity- Vlatka Horvat

As part of the Gravity Lecture series guest are required to bring an object of significance with them and honestly I was more interested in Horvats object that I was her art work. Her object was a wooden picture frame that had seen better days. She described it as mainly a hole, a negative space that contains, encompassess things. After all it is the frame that frames the real thing that you are meant to be looking at. It is a supporter. An empty frame becomes the site for projection and imagination. When a frame is broken, its bondaries are broken and the thing that it contains threates to leak out.

A room can be a frame, a space of possiblity. Horvat interfears with the aspects of a room, what could and should be done in it. That aside I accutally dont like her work, even though I wrote three pages on her, mostly it was description. Its not that I dont like installation work, I do, and I understood what she was trying to acomplish, I just dont like what she creates. The onlt work I did like was Beside Itself, which was made up od long carboard strips that spiralled out from the center of the room becoming more square in its shape as it reach the edges of the walls. Because it was so close to the walls it meant there was only enough space for people to walk single file around it. Some people said it felt like the piece was pushing them against the wall and it felt quite confronting.

 

Beside Itself

Transmission- Chris Kraus

Kraus is an LA based writer and has wrote a number of artist reviews and books on artists. Recently she has written a novel and thats what she talked about. For the lecture she read one chapter from the new novel, which took her 5 years to write. For me personally I was more interested in her as a writer and how she came up with ideas for her book and character profiles and such, which wasn't the point of the lecture. I did find the lecture quite boring because I was being read to, I think I might have enjoyed it more if I had the book in my hands and was reading it to myself.

Gravity- Malcom Le Grice

Very interesting man, likes to talk alot, I have the feeling he could have gone on all night about his work and it was really nice to see that he enjoyed talking about his work. According to Le Grice he is very anti-narative against cinematic viewing of video art. When he makes a film he never starts with a theory, always the materiality of the object. He became interested in the faults of cinema and its imperfections of home videos. His most famous work is the Berlin Horse, which is is a combination of nedative and colour slides with sound track on a double projection. the sound track is quite unusual but after a while can become quite annooying as it is played on a loop. Loops being what Le Grice was experimenting with at the time. Because Le Grice doesn't use narative in his videos some of them come across quite weird and bizar, he does this because he believes his interpretations shouldn't guide our interpretations. I enjoyed most of it, although towards the end it was going on for a bit too long.

Transmission- Patrisha (Trish) Lyons

Lyons topics of the talk were optical illusions and figure ground and technology. the first half of the talk she spent talking about Penrose Stairs and showed us clips from animals in nature hat camoflaged themselves. There was one clip of an ocutipus that was really good, you can probably find it on youtube. She also showed us this one clip by Alvin Lucier, called I Am Sitting In A Room (1969). It is 45 minutes long and in the video the american composer, who has a strutter records his voice in a room. He then plays the recording in the same room and records the recording. He does this a number of times until you just get sound which is the resonence of the room. Which I think is pretty cool. The second half she spent talking about how all humans are machines, just made from flesh and blood instead. she also talked about the film Blade Runner with Harrison Ford, and how inorder to figure out whether someone is a cyborg he asked them about their relationship to animals. Not sure how this was all meant to relate to agency, but oh well.

Transmission Lecture Series- Lucy Reynolds

Another one of our lecture series is Transmission which this years is about Agency (Labour, Work, Action). Last tuesday we were given a lecture by Lucy Reynolds. Reynolds is interested in the digital community, the materiality of film and the disscourse that surrounds it. According to Reynolds she is a Jack-of-all trades, working across different mediums. She also has a very strong feminist agenda.

At the Camden Arts Centre she held an exbihition inwhich she asked a number of artists to make films no more than 30mins long which could be looped. For her it created an interesting sense of authorship and collaboration. Her film work explores the political and gender conflict in landscape and culture.

Gravity Lecture Series- Luke Fowler

As part of the Creative Art Practice course I am on at Sheffield Hallam University we have a Gravity lecture series, in which practicing artists talk about their work in relation to the theme of the lecture series, which this year is atmosphere. Last thursdays lecture was by video artist Luke Fowler a nominee for the 2012 Turner Prize.

Fowler’s work combines archival and new footage in such a way that they convey something of the personal and political dynamics of a range of countercultural figures and movements. In the lecture he spoke about the importance of sound in film and how imagery and sound work together.

Kelvin Okafor

Flicking through the Daily Mail on Jan 31, 2013 and came across this artist. Okafor is a British photorealist artist based in London. I think his work is very good, extraordinary even, and he creates a very impressive likeness, however I have seen alot of these very realistic pencil drawings and so the impact of seeing them has worn off. There is no doubt however with regards to the artists skill, which as shown is extremely good.

Kelvin Okafor- Website

Berlin Trip

Last year in November some of us went on a whirl wind one week uni trip to Berlin. Let me tell you I saw more pieces of art work and visited more galleries in that one week than I had in my entire life and I was completely worn out by the end of it. We stayed at the A&O Hostel Mitte, which is a 7mins walk from the Heinrich-Hein-Strasse U-Bahn. Also because it is Berlin they all speak really good English in the cafes and restaurants.

List of Galleries

• LoBe Gallery
• Galerie Max Hetzler
• Gallery Mehdi Chouakri
• Hamburger Bahnhof- FYI the people who monitor the gallery are really unfriendly and watch you constantly like hawks incase the touch the work, heaven forbid.
• Galerie Crone
• Carlier Gebauer
• Galerie Cruise&Callas
• Konrad Fisher Galerie
• Zak Branicka
• Kunstlerhaus Bethanien

Places to Eat

• I-Shin (Cheap Japanese Food) on Mittelstrasse
• Chaapa, adalbertstr 9/10999 (Thali Food- tastes really) you get off at Kottbusser (Google map is a bit outdated, but that is the right place and if you keep walking up that road there are a bunch of other places to eat too.
• The Hostel Food is not bad either

Also Berlin has some really interesting architexture and there is grafitti every where, most of which is quite interesting.

 

Natalie Dybisz

Natalie 'Miss Aniela' Dybisz is an English fine-art and commeriacl photographer based in London.

"Photography is always my 'living' whether I am working on personal or commercial work, because it is creating that keeps me feeling alive. I pour my mind into everything I create, and always aim to push the envelope with consistently compelling imagery with the highest production value I can make possible. In my personal work I want to stir people to question and think, intelligibly- about problems, the beauty, and the conflict between them, in the world around us today."

 

Natalie Dybisz- Website

I really like her dramatic photographs, especially her outdoor scenes an I really love the glamerous outfits she somtimes uses, especially the evening gowns.

Kirsty Mitchell

Mitchell is an English artist, her earliest memories were always of the stories read to her by her mother as a child. Her mother instilled in her an imagination and a belief in beauty, which became Mitchells root and the place she would constantly return to in her work.

After her mothers death photography engulted Mitchell, she found herself producing pieces that echoed the memories of her mother's stories. By combining her various backgrounds, she started to create images in which everything was made or designed by Mitchell, with the occassional help of a few friends.

Kirsty Mitchell- Website

I love her work, the exquisitness of the photographs, the attention to detail. I have always loved fairytales and now hope to into my work, the fantasy of another world, a different time, a different place.

Paul Morrison, Millennium Gallery

Paul Morrison is a Sheffield based artist. His work finds inspiration in the historic and contemporary, from engravings and botanical illustrations to comics and animation. The resulting pictures may look comfortably familiar at first but look closer and oddities or contradictions soon surface. This exhibition was about distance and value systems. Some works were made from gold leaf, giving a feeling og high value, yet the illustration was almost cartoonist, showing the distance in the value systems.

Chris Geall, The Geall Gallery

We visted this gallery in Gosmont on a family trip out. Chris Geall wasn't always a painter, originally he trained as a potter after finishing his degree in Chemical Engineering. However after being unsuccessful with his pottery buisness he moved on to painting.

 

Chris Geall- Website

The painting technique reminds me abit of Leonid Afremov's work, they both use the palette knife to great effect when using oil colours. I like so many of them I didn't know which ones to show, so I kind of went abit mad, I promise I havn't posted all of his work so you can still go to his website and see his other paintings.