OBSESSIONS
FEBRUARY 2008
WOMAN IN A WARDROBE AT MODERN ART OXFORD
8 – 16 March 2008
OBsessions, ‘Oxford Brookes Sessions’ will showcase the best new emerging talent in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University, alongside more established artists who have studied at the university recently.
OBsessions celebrates the exploration, freedom, and a personal response to contemporary art and life that form the basis of Fine Art studies at Brookes. Installation, 2D images, sculpture, sound and film contribute to an exhibition that is fresh, varied and thoughtful.
In collaboration with the staff of Modern Art Oxford, Brookes students have worked to ensure balance and cohesion among over sixty diverse works, which include a woman in a wardrobe, a life-size centaur, paint propelled by sound waves and hoops bowling through the streets of Oxford.
Suzanne Cotter, Acting Director and Senior Curator at Modern Art Oxford commented:
“The sixty-four artists featuring in OBsessions are Brookes students at post-graduate and undergraduate levels, and recent graduates. Without doubt, OBsessions will form a significant marker in the careers of many of these new faces in the art world.”
John Hoole, Oxford Brookes’ exhibition co-ordinator, added:
“Modern Art Oxford has provided Oxford Brookes with a splendid showcase for its current students and recent graduates. Personal foibles, political aspirations, performative occurrences, social concerns all surface in OBsessions and reveal the richly diverse seams of talent that are quarried at Headington.”
Ends
For further information and images please contact:
Sara Dewsbery, Press & Marketing Officer at Modern Art Oxford on 01865 813813, sara.dewsbery@modernartoxford.org.uk
Lucy Morris at Oxford Brookes on 01865 483575, lucy.morris@brookes.ac.uk
Note to Editors: About the Artists
PhD student Lisa Busby will be creating Moths Wings, an interactive and multi-sensory installation that she will inhabit for the duration of the show. The work will consist of a large wardrobe inside which, and spilling out onto the surrounding floor space, will be a mixture of items including crockery, lamps, plants, knitted flowers and digitally manipulated photographic images. Busby will be creating an ongoing musical soundscape from sampled natural and domestic sounds, singing, reading aloud, and inviting visitors to enter the space and sit with her. Busby comments “Moths Wings is an installation which explores our complex relationships, as humans, with both the domestic, interior spaces of our own creation, and the outdoor natural world; with actual locations and illusory ones.”
Seb Thomas’ Centaur sculpture, seeks to reveal dichotomous tensions: man and animal, passion and rationality, right and wrong, strong and weak, action and reflection. The centaur stands motionless in the gallery space, head hanging low, arms by his sides with bow in hand. A small distance away there is a smattering of arrows embedded in the wall and floor. Thomas comments: “By creating evidence of a past event, I wanted the work to capture a moment in time which most poignantly exposes these forces that work against one another.”
Warren Shaw’s Transference are water based, mixed media works on canvas. The process involved utilizes a tuning fork, transferring the vibration of sound to a liquid. The liquid’s form changes dramatically and is propelled by the energy transferred, thus taking on a direct representation of the sonic energy emanating from the fork. Shaw comments: “These compositions expose the relationship between sound and space within a visual context. Space almost cannot exist without sound and vice versa in contemporary environments. The work breaches the subject of emergence, decay, reverberations and interaction between sonic sources”.
Shirley Pegna’s Ringing Road is an outside sound piece, involving a group of people bowling metal hoops along the pavement. The different size hoops make a unique blend of startlingly diverse tones and pitches that ring rather like strange clanking bells. Pegna comments: “The sound is made very simply, but has a rich subtlety and uniquely makes the Oxford streets themselves into a musical instrument”.
Modern Art Oxford and Oxford Brookes University are grateful for the support of The Holywell Press Ltd, Hook Norton Brewery, Peter Osborne & Co Fine Wines, The Grog Shop, Threshers, Marston and The Garden, Oxford.