Worcestershire Arts Partnership Blog

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Art Review - Movement Gallery at Worcester's Foregate St. Sation, Blackbird in Infospace, the exhibition which has come out of Juneau Project's recent residency at Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery.

I recently visited Movement Gallery at Worcester's Foregate St. Sation, to see Blackbird in Infospace, the exhibition which has come out of Juneau Project's recent residency at Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery.

The exhibition features objects which serve as post-apocalyptic artefacts (or "Infopocalypse" as the accompanying literature describes it), showing the an imagined world as it was before it ended. Technology is heavily featured in the exhibition, in particular through the use of laser cutting as a typically industrial method to produce fine art, an evocative contrast which alludes to what kind of world the artists imagine these objects being relics from.

The wider project produced by this residency is also very technology focused, with USB access points set up all over the city allowing Juneau Projects' to give away their Worcester-inspired album track by track to anyone who has a USB stick, simply by pushing a button. The USB points as housed in shrines in five Worcester landmarks – The Hive, Movement Gallery, Rise Worcester, the Guildhall, and Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery. The tracks contain sounds gathered from all over the city, and sometimes even created by residents. This project both narrows and widens; the music has been collected from sounds made all over the city, yet visitors will have to traverse the city in order to collect each song.

I also quickly paid a visit to the Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery itself to revisit the My Generation exhibition. For me, highlights of this chronological look at art over several decades included John Collier's 1914 Clytemnestra, Gillian Ayres' 1993 Sika II, and Eastside Projects' collaborators Heather and Ivan Morrison's 2004 I put you on a mile long string, but you still broke away. As with the Juneau Projects work, this is well worth a visit.

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