ROLL UP ROLL UP. I have some exciting news.
Elysium Gallery, the fantastic artist-led space at 41 High Street, Swansea is moving to bigger and better things. From this weekend the artspace as you know it will be closing down and hopping over to set up a top new creative space in a former brothel on Mansel Street, Swansea.
The two floor space which has entertained high street drinkers and arty thinkers alike with its mix of site-specific installation and out-there performance art alongside more traditional forms is expanding. The new Elysium Gallery will live at 96 – 97 Mansel Street, Swansea, SA1 5UE, and will host 20+ artist studios in the “strange smaller upstairs rooms” as well as exhibitions and an artist hub space with internet access and library resources. Exactly what Swansea needs, especially with the imminent refurbishment of the Glynn Vivian taking their resources out of the picture frame for a while.
As such this week marks your last chance to go along and catch some art at the original Elysium Gallery. Go see Dialogues: A Fake Romance?, the innovative multi-media group show curated by Diana Ali that closes tomorrow. Film, photography and interactive projects ask whether dialogue hinders us or furthers us? Then, suitably inspired, start thinking about what you can enter into the extravaganza of an opening show for Elysium (Take Two). This will be the only time an exhibition uses all three floors of the new space before the top two floors are divided up into artist studios available to let. Exciting, no?
I have been attacked by lurgy so I’m afraid I’m taking the lazy blogger route today and letting the gallery explain what they are after in submissions for the show… Here is their shout out to creative types, word-for-word:
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OPEN EXHIBITION: AFTER THE END
Ten years ago the influential art critic and author Arthur Danto announced that art had ended in the sixties. For Danto, the art that emerged after this had lost its spirit and its purpose. The past was no longer a place from which to react against, art no longer had to pit an agenda or conform to a certain aesthetic. The meta-narrative was over and so was arts’ significance and influence.
Philosophical questions abound! If you listen to some, art is now a post-modern, soul-less shadow of its former modernist self. No longer pushing boundaries and rejecting the past, it now just regurgitates past ideas and movements and relies on irony, cheap laughs, gimmicks and an obsession with trashy celebrity culture to get by… The School of Saatchianyone?
“The end?”
“The end?”
Elysium Gallery is looking for submissions exploring the notion of ‘After the end’
- What happens to the characters of a film when it has ended?
- What happens to a house after the lights have gone out and everyone has left?
- Memories become more distant everyday and so history dies everyday…what happens after the end?
We are looking for national & international artists working in any medium from painting, performance & sculpture to written word, film, song, installation and anything in between.
This will be the first exhibition in the new home of Elysium Gallery and will be the only time we will be using all three floors in this massive building before the top 2 floors are carved up into artists’ studios. The building is currently a maze of large open spaced areas and small rooms with a mixture of flocked wall paper and layers of paint and decoration from over the years covering the walls.
You can download an application form from our website atwww.elysiumgallery.com or email Jon at elysiumgallery@yahoo.co.uk for a form and any further information if you require.
Dates of exhibition: 14th May – 11th June
Deadline for submissions: 30th April
Deadline for submissions: 30th April
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Thanks Elysium! So what are you waiting for? Get involved!
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IN OTHER NEWS: SWANSEA LOVE STORY
And finally, as I have been knocked out with flu, I also failed to write up the brilliant, heartbreaking, FREE screening of Swansea Love Story at Sin City last Friday. Mike Leigh’s son Leo Leigh is certainly one to watch in future cinema. Alongside Andy Capper he captured the reality between Swansea’s rising heroin problem pretty damn well by asking everyone from users, to drug treatment centres, kids on the streets, working men clubs and male voice choirs. It centres on the love story between Cornelius and Amy, both young alcoholic heroin users. Sensitive, socially aware film-making, it avoids the usual tabloid sensationalist spin. You can watch episodes of the film online atwww.vbs.tv
These reviews of the film are pretty decent too, I would have said similar, if I had been able to type:
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