Light Night Leeds!

Light Night was on Friday in Leeds! It’s a free event, on for only one night a year, where the whole city is turned into a giant art exhibition, with performances, installations, videos, sculptures, talks, events, and so on! There were over 70 different things to see and experience, including a meditation class, tours of the town hall clock tower, talks on the Mario Merz exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, as well as more traditional exhibitions in gallery spaces.

Light Night is such a good way of exploring a city more, as you can see parts that you wouldn’t normally be allowed into, and also a great way to get everyone involved in art. If you were out in the city that night, you couldn’t help but notice all the things going on, and how many people were out. The whole city felt more linked together and the atmosphere was great – there was a sense of excitement coming from everyone that was out for Light Night, which helped to get people (that maybe wouldn’t have ordinarily been interested) engaged with what was going on. I thought one of the best projects for Light Night for getting people involved was ‘Get Some Fresh Air: Lumen with Andy Abbott’, where people could play video games that were projected on a gargantuan scale on the sides of buildings in Leeds.

We played ‘Rampage’ where you are a monster, like Godzilla or King Kong and you have to punch the buildings until they fall down, which was slightly bizarre when projected onto the side of a real building! There was also a racing game, Tetris and Donkey Kong, all projected between 10 and 30 feet tall on the architecture of Leeds. This project was good for all ages, which I see as being one of the main strong points for the whole of Light Night, and was impossible to miss as you walk past. Many people also make a direct link between video games and having fun, so seeing the screen you’d be tempted to take part, and then maybe be directed to another exhibition or event, and then become involved in the whole night.

A few other exhibitions we saw and took part in were; ‘Sideways in the Light: Simon Warner’, where you can have an Edwardian style silhouette photograph taken; ‘The People’s Exhibition: Kirsty Ware’ where everyone becomes an artist by drawing a picture and hanging it up in a dedicated exhibition space for people to see for one night only; and ‘Narcissus Returns: George Rodosthenous’, which was a performance in and around the swimming pool on campus, covering issues of beauty, narcissism, competitiveness, Echo and water.

Many of the exhibitions were inventive in solving their curatorial issues. Some of the projects were placed in the main square of Leeds, just so as to reach the largest amount of people possible. Others directly referenced the space they were situated in, such as ‘Craftgarden: Craftsville Art Club’, which created beautiful spaces inside the old Victorian prison cells in the basement of the Town Hall.

Light Night isn’t just on in Leeds – Bury, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Dundee, Kirkcaldy, Liverpool, Nottingham, Perth, and Stoke-on-Trent all have their own events, so next year please go and visit one of them and get involved!

If you’d like to know more, take a look at this website for the Leeds Light Night – http://lightnightleeds.co.uk/

Or check out this website for Light Night events for the whole of the UK – http://www.lightnight.co.uk/.

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Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn is an amazing artist everyone should know! She makes sculptural clothing, or body modification pieces, that she uses to play with the space around her. She primarily works with installations and as a performance artist. Horn originally worked using fibre glass, until she contracting acute lung poisoning from working without a mask on, meaning she had to drop out of art school and spend a year in a sanatorium recovering. While she was there both her parents died, causing her to feel “totally isolated”. Unable to use her traditional methods of creating art, due to being so weak from the illness, she took to using coloured pencils and creating sculptures using cloth and balsa wood. Whilst still bed ridden she found a way to explore her surroundings, making sculptures that became extensions of her body. She decided that a way to combat her loneliness was by “communicating through bodily forms”, and carried on creating works after she was recovered that were like extensions, or, conversely, like cocoons. I think from this she wanted to find a way to explore the spaces around her, while protecting herself from another bad thing happening to her. Through her work it seemed like she simultaneously wanted to display herself and hide herself away. The cocoon-like works seem at once like they are protecting the performer, and trapping them.

My favourite piece of hers is Finger Gloves (1972), which I referenced in my own work (Seen below). The piece is made from cloth and balsa wood, using them to create long finger extensions so that the performer could touch the far walls and ceiling of the space at the same time. She later created a piece similar to this, but fitted exactly to the measurements of the room, so if the performer stood in the exact centre of the room they could precisely touch the walls at each end of the room at the same time. Horn wanted the work to feel as though the fingers were really extended, becoming a part of the wearer’s body, so they feel they are actually touching the walls or ceiling.

I love Rebecca Horn’s work, partly just as an instinctive reaction to the aesthetic (as all initial reactions to art are), but also because I love her ideas surrounding freedom and boundary – both being forced upon the performer and being broken by her.

Link to her page

http://www.rebecca-horn.de/

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First Post!

Welcome to my blog!

With this blog I hope to tackle issues of being original, working within the ‘White Cube’, alternative curation, and the ‘transformatory’ nature of art, as well as sharing with you some of the artists and places that I love. Hopefully it will eventually become a melting pot of ideas, links, and inspiration for anyone who needs it. (Me included!) The idea is that it will start a conversation between me, you, and the rest of the art world, and be a place to crit work, and share artists and ideas that you love (or hate, anything that evokes emotion is good!). I’d love it if you sent links to your own work as well!

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So, to start us off, here’s an artist that I love: Bruce Nauman.

Bruce Nauman, 'Window or Wall Sign' (1967)

In particular his videos/performances and his neons. His work is almost never serious, and always seems to make a comment or joke on the viewer or state of the world. My favourite are those of his performances that involve constricting the body in some way, where the viewer can experience the same setting, such as in ‘Performance Corridor’.

'Performance Corridor' (1969) by Bruce Nauman

Related Links:

http://speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/record.html?record=1

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=4243

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Do you have any artists, books, films, or other links that you’d like to share?

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