Save the date!
We have a group exhibition opening on Saturday 5th November at the ever supportive Galerie Simpson, Swansea.
4pm-7pm – All welcome.
At the beginning of 2016 I was very fortunate to be asked by the gallery to curate a group exhibition. I instantly knew the topic and who I wanted involved.
The themes of Austerity & Nostalgia in all it’s guises run through the work they’ve created for the show.
Here’s the official press release:
Galerie Simpson is delighted to present ‘Austerity Nostalgia’ – a show of our time, curated by Catrin Saran James. Our second exhibition with Catrin, this promises to be a real catalyst for thought, discussion and debate. Austerity Nostalgia has recently become a cultural and artistic obsession and Catrin looks to explore artistic response to this current trend for sampling public modernism. She says of the ideas behind the show,
‘‘I’m interested in how the recent past is re-interpreted. With my Archivist hat on, it’s something that’s on my mind a lot. This covers social history, politics, fashion, domesticity, design, music etc. I’m looking at the time between the 1930s to the 1980s. These decades are continually being rediscovered and possibly mis-interpreted to reflect a false authenticity. This could possible change future generations perspective of what was the recent past. You see it already with sanitised versions or rose tinted spectacles of what it was like to live in WW2 with the term ‘Blitz Spirit’ being over used, a new festishisation of Brutalist architecture and the like and possibly looking back to even the Miner’s Strike in the early 1980s with films like Pride. Austerity Nostalgia is a question more than a statement, a subject I’d like to talk to others about and does it really matter?’
As in her solo project at Galerie Simpson, this show is set to ask as many questions as to give answers. She cites – ‘Are those sampling their way through eras and cultural movements ripping it up and putting it back together in a tasteless manner? And if so, is this because they are simply taking visual nods from popular culture to create a morphed past of cross-culture mulch? By doing so are they ultimately giving young people who are interested in scratching the surface in mid 20th century history the wrong information? Are we devaluing our cultural and social history?’
Above – Mark James
Hope to see you at some point over the duration of the show.
Catrin Saran James 