Time and Place, Hither and Thither, War and Peace, exhibition review and interview

"Time and Place, Hither and Thither, War and Peace....We bring you a visial conversation (without words). Come and find out what that means...."


....And of course we did go, here's what we found out....

The Pop up gallery stands out on Linthorpe road tonight, brightly lit for an exhibition by the artist collective GnU AgB. Middlesbrough’s creative lot are braving the cold and even the dark to attend the opening of ‘Time and place, Hither and Thither, War and Peace’

GnU AgB is a non-profit, art collective consisting of artists, illustrators, designers from across the UK. They actively work together on projects and provide support for individual or smaller group projects.

The Pop Up Gallery is a small, but perfectly formed mini-gallery in an enviable location on Linthorphe road. Comfortably retro and happily unpretentious, its public-friendly and ideal for this young collectives show.

“Time and Place…” consists mainly of contemporary graphic design based art; inside we found a whole range of work by different artists in different media, colour, style shape, format and size.

This exhibition is running parallel to one of the same name in Newcastle, having not experienced Newcastle’s, I can’t judge which I prefer, but they would be hard pushed to match the diversity and passion these images convey.

But with such a large collections of different artists and points of view compressed into such a small space, was it over whelming for the audience?

“It’s all very interesting,” said one visitor, “The dislocation adds to the view of the work as a form of conversation.”

As we looked around, we couldn’t help getting a political, revolutionary vibe from the work. If it is to be viewed as a conversation, then it would be one that started light and flirty, a dash whimsical, then headed straight into angry talk about the state of the world today, with sinister undertones, and abstract comments.

Who’s to say that’s a bad thing? Art is nothing if not a social commentary. At this point I’m going to stop reviewing and urge you to go see “Time and Place…” for yourselves.

148 Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough. Open daily 10 til 5.

Later, after the Opening night, We Are Open caught up with curator Dan Rad (cool name) to talk a bit more about the Art of “Time and Place…”

We Are Open: Hi Dan, can you tell us a bit about the whole concept of the exhibition?

The exhibition, what we have here is a collective of artists based across the united kingdom and from abroad now, including American and recently Japan, there’s a Japanese artist involved, we work primarily within the graphic design format, with variations within that of course, print making digital media linear drawing and also forms of photography.

We Are Open: Are all the Artists based in Teesside?

Well, we have two exhibitions running at the moment, ones in Newcastle, and there’s this exhibition based in Teesside, a proportion of the artists are from, or have lived in Teesside or studied at Teesside university, such as Norma Kyle, Myself, Michael Hall, Karan Lewis, Adam Hogarth and Steven round.

We Are Open: So is the Art inspired by Teesside?

It’s inspired by a theme we have running, we sent out a proposal to everybody, which was Time and Place, Hither an thither, War and Peace….So I wouldn’t say it is Teesside generically, but more of a running theme and conversation between the artists.

We Are Open: Were you concerned about curating an exhibition with some many different styles and media?

Within this space? No, because we have so many different variations in media, and formats and such, this space has given us an invaluable opportunity to display them one by one next to each other. Because everybody was working from the same starting point, even though they’re varying in style and imagery they’re all in conversation with each other at the same time.

We Are Open: So, if it’s a conversation, what do you think its saying?

That’s an interesting question, it think there’s a lot of stress between the work from what I perceive so far I think anxiety about socio-political issues at the moment, hence in my work, news articles that create the UK (Dan’s work is a large outline of the UK made from words and phrases) and are related to issues at the moment, there are a few artists that have gone off on a tangent, doing more abstract forms of expression

We Are Open: So what are you guys hoping to take from the We Are Open Experience?

Personally I’m giving myself an active opportunity to run my own exhibition space, I’ve never really had the chance outside an academic root. Generally I think with the We Are Open scheme and the Pop Up Galleries it gives us the freedom to work as a collective of people in a neutral space.