Events
Light LitOliver Hewlett
26 February - 26 February 2007
This exhibition, by Oliver Howlett (a third year BA Photography in the Arts student at Swansea Institute) explores the relationship between changing light and this gallery as it changes, too.
The work will be exhibited in the Mission Gallery, Swansea, and will concentrate on the changes a gallery goes through. The work is to be shown on a day which normally would be closed to the public; in between two official exhibitions. As one exhibition is taken down there is time to reflect on the space as an empty room as apposed to a gallery space, and notice a change before the next artist comes along.
Does the gallery space stop being a gallery space if there is no work in it? Is a urinal just a functional object or a work of art if Marcel Duchamp declares to be the latter? Should a space renowned for exhibiting art always have to deliver art as such? My work will question what makes a gallery. Polaroid’s are shot to the same scale as to what is seen on the wall, only by getting in close can it record a segment of wall, so close that the camera cannot focus on the subject.
This work should encourage the viewer to ask questions about the space, what a gallery is, and how art changes and moves on within it. The site-specific and performative recording elements to the work suggest and strengthen the ideas of change, time and space. I think of my work more as a performative installation than a photographic exhibition as the whole space will be taken into account, not just the images I place in the space.
