The Gallery
Mission Open 2008Open Exhibition
21 June - 12 July 2008
We are very pleased to be showing a selection of new work by some of Wales's top names alongside a generation of young emerging artists, some of whom have recently graduated. The work encompasses a broad range of approaches and interest in current artistic, social, and cultural concerns and includes covering a broad range of disciplines, from photography, painting, printmaking, digital media and textiles.
The exhibition was selected by Mission Gallery's new board of directors and the winner of the Mission Open Prize is Tom Pope, a recent graduate of the BA Photography degree at Swansea Metropolitan University. Tom is currently studying his MA at the Royal College of Art in London and had his first solo show at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in February 2010.
Tom Pope's practice embraces the performative act in order to highlight the discourse between a potentially time-based photography and a privileged notion of event. The utilizing of performative strategies within his photography sees the photographic record of an event and the event itself form a creative dialogue. Subsequently the resulting performative photograph encourages the viewer to invent meaning resulting from a blurring of fact and fiction. Instead of an objective document, we create a vague and uncertain document. One that is best approached from a subjective perspective. Combining this strategy with that of repetition we see the protagonist suspended within space as he translates his unbridled demeanor into absurd actions; actions that result in an ambiguous record, generating the photograph as a gravity defying ‘floating' signifier.
