Septemember 24 2013//
The final exhibition in the year-long 4 x venue This ‘me’ of Mine ACE funded tour has opened at Ipswich Art School Gallery, Colchester & Ipswich Museum Service, Ipswich, Suffolk. The show will continue until January 5, 2014.
The gallery is housed within a Victorian purpose-built art school that serves mainly as an exhibition space today, alongside education programmes and workshops. There are are numerous rooms leading from the striking, octagonal, light-filled atrium and entrance, with more exhibition spaces connected to the upper balcony. Lined with exposed water pipes, the glass roof is both a functional and beautiful structure.
On the afternoon of the opening September 21 (2 – 5pm) it was really great to eventually meet co-exhibiting artists who I had been in contact with on social media but not actually met in person, including David Riley, Gary Mansfield, Annabel Dover and Suzanne de Emmony.
Artworks by Sandra Crisp in the exhibition Left: Tales from the City (1 minute) video Right: The Bigger Picture Large-format digital print. Out of frame, to the right, Zoetrop_motion video is projected onto the lower section of the same wall.
I am exhibiting The Bigger Picture large-formatdigital print and 2 short moving image works: Tales From the City (1 minute) and Zoetrop_Motion both on continual loop in one of the ground floor exhibition room. (photo above)
Exhibiting the moving image work in juxtaposition with other wall-based artworks, such as painting and mixed media by other artists, presented the opportunity to re evaluate how the work is received differently when compared to a more traditional darkened, sit-down, cinema-style screening. Rather than being set aside in a separate room, the moving images now relate to nearby works in quite unexpected but positive ways in terms of colour, composition & concept.
Thanks to in-house technician Darren for performing a magic trick with the projectors so that my films looked really sharp, not displaying the usual DVD fuzzy compression symptoms which my work usually succumbs to. I must remember this for the next time as it makes such a difference to the image quality. (Which wires, where?!)
‘Hello World’, a short Vine video of the work being installed at Ipswich can be found here
Enigma
We were really pleased to have Enigma interactive project ready for the show after a relatively short development time, thanks to Luis’ expert programming skills. Also to Visual Planet, Cambridge for their kind support in terms of sponsorship of the touch-screen.
Self portrait with Enigmaavatar-generating artwork – A Collaboration between Sandra Crisp, Luis Marques and Jane Boyer
How it works:
(1) The viewer creates gestures on the screen by using direct touch
(2) Clicks ‘create avatar’ button
(3) Each avatar will then be archived and become visible on the surface of a rotating 3D sphere
(4) The sphere will eventually become richly textured with different avatars generated by visitor interaction and will be searchable by rotating and selecting avatars. However, once the sphere is filled with 100 avatars, it will return to a blank state, beginning the process again.
(Photo Credit: David Riley) Interacting on the touch screen: Jane Boyer (left) and Sandra Crisp (right) Children from a workshop held at the gallery really enjoyed drawing on the screen and created great avatars for the sphere.
Sandra Crisp: Texture brush sample – Enigma incorporates brush samples/ textures that can be used to draw on the touch-screen, sampled via a menu of interactive thumbnails.
Luis, testing, testing….
Luis Marques, our creative programmer creating his own Enigma avatar
Exhibiting artists are: Aly Helyer, Edd Pearman, Cathy Lomax, Darren Nixon, Hayley Harrison, Melanie Titmuss, Annabel Dover, Kate Murdoch, David Minton, Anthony Boswell, David Riley, Sandra Crisp, Sarah Hervey, Shireen Qureshi, and Jane Boyer.
Guest Artists are: Kai-Oi Jay Yung, Gary Mansfield, Molly Behagg, Andrew Litten, Suzanne de Emmony, Helen Scalway, Lisa Snook, Jacqueline Utley, Edward Chell and Kate Elliott.