The Gallery
Ephemeral CoastCurated by Celina Jeffery
14 June - 03 August 2014
Featuring Julia Davis (Australia), Stefhan Caddick (Wales), Fern Thomas (Wales) & Gemma Copp (Wales)
Curated by Celina Jeffery
Ephemeral Coast is an international, 4-year curatorial research project led by Celina Jeffery (University of Ottawa,Canada), which will be launched at Mission Gallery in Swansea during the summer of 2014. The exhibition as a whole seeks to “explore the changing cultures, geographies and ecologies of coastlines internationally and bring awareness to these fragile and temporal spaces through the affective practices of art making.”
The first of these art projects/exhibitions will take place in collaboration with Mission Gallery in Swansea in June 2014, the second in Mauritius and the third in Alaska and the Arctic region of Western Canada. Other partners in coastal regions will also participate. The research project will culminate in 2017/8 in a large-scale exhibition ideally taking place in venues across Swansea Bay - including Carmarthen - with a large exhibition catalogue and symposium.
Artists in each of these locations have been selected to make and exhibit new work in response to the curatorial premise. In turn, academics and community members from a variety of universities including the University of Ottawa,University of Swansea and the University of Wolverhampton, have been invited to participate in programming around the show. They will then continue to create these links, to support the dialogue concerning the themes generated by the exhibitions.
The spirit of the exhibition is that of collaboration, dialogue and partnership to develop focused exhibitions and discussions as well as increasing the outreach of the exhibition to wide and diverse audiences. A website will house all artworks and discussions generated by the exhibition.
The exhibition will encourage participation from both local audiences as well as international ones through the main website.
Image courtesy of Julia Davis
Celina Jeffery, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor of History and Theory of Art at the University of Ottawa. Previous projects have included Preternatural (2011-12) which brought together eight international artists to explore the spaces where the natural and unnatural collide and comprised of five exhibitions at venues across Ottawa, Canada. Other exhibitions include: Lines of Flight, at Hunter College, NYC, 2007; Afterglow (featuring Ghada Amer, Alfredo Jaar and Bill Viola, amongst others) in Lacoste, France, 2007; Wangechi Mutu: The Cinderella Curse at the ACA Gallery, Georgia, USA, 2007; and the international group show, Hold On, co-curated with Avantika Bawa at Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, 2011. She is the co-editor with Gregory Minissale of Global and Local Art Histories (2007) and the co-founder and editor of Drain Magazine: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. Her new book, The Artist as Curator, will be published by Intellect.
