The point of travelling to Scotland was to be in attendance for at least one of the sessions of Joe’s final year exhibition, or should I say the Abertay Digital Graduate Show. Not that this piece of artwork is ‘digital’, but it seems that the BA Games Design and Production projects can be in whatever medium one likes. At least you can’t get an AI to do this kind of stuff. Good luck to them all.
Another movie reference, courtesy of the exhibition currently running at the Design Museum in London, featuring a range of drawings, models, photos and other artefacts that have poured out of the head of director Tim Burton over the last 50 years or so. Two things are apparent; 1) the guy can have done very little in his life other than pour out this endless stream of creative work, more or less constantly; 2) there is some seriously weird shit going on inside that head. Worth seeing though.
An early post today as I now sit at Heathrow Airport waiting for an overnight flight. Unless something goes seriously wrong, the next three weeks of posts will all be coming from places a damn sight warmer than this one.
Yesterday, the outside of the V & A Dundee — today, the inside. Except we’re not in Dundee any more, but it’s Studio 54 in New York, circa 1979, and Grace Jones is doing her inimitable stuff with body paint by Keith Haring. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday morning. (The exhibition is on until January, if you are interested.)
Clare and Joe have been down in London since Friday night, and if you want to keep Joe happy on a Sunday morning in London, an exhibition on video games is going to be a good bet. The Victoria and Albert Museum obliges. These are phones, hanging from the ceiling; the wires are more intended to stop visitors nicking them than anything else, but I like the effect, and the two knotted intimately together, left of centre.
Last day of a run of five in London, and of this time away from home. Hebden Bridge hasn’t featured since 21st January, but it will tomorrow, because I’m now home and ain’t going anywhere. Well, not until Tuesday anyway.
My week’s work is done — time for the weekend, which started when Clare arrived to join me in London in the afternoon and I took her to see this exhibition in the Barbican. I saw one of the world’s most famous photos today — Migrant Mother — you’ll know it when you see it. But we weren’t allowed to take photos of that nor the other photos from Dorothea Lange who documented the Great Depression in the USA and the internment of Japanese-Americans in WW2, many photos from these collections were shown today and very interesting it was too.
The Saturday afternoon of this weekend in London was spent at the Barbican centre, where at the moment, among other things, there is a superb exhibition of sci-fi paraphernalia, films, art and so on. If you are a geek and are anywhere near London, you really do have to go and see this — John Hurt’s space suit from Alien, Leonard Nimoy’s from Star Trek The Motion Picture (Spock’s space suit!!), the original screenplay from 2001, storyboards from many movies including Dune and Star Wars… and those were just my personal highlights. Go! I don’t know what movie these two were enjoying but I like the image, the face, the shadows.
There is an excellent photography exhibition on at Manchester Art Gallery if you get the chance to go and see it. “Strange but Familiar” — Britain through the eyes of foreign photographers, from the 1930s to the present day. I saw it first time back in December but went back today, taking the family, trying to engage the boy in some media studies. Plenty of people there, including this guy, peering aesthetically at the ‘Swinging London’ section. The shot continues the run I mentioned yesterday, though that will be the last (10th) day of it — tomorrow will definitely be spent entirely in Hebden Bridge.
Joe and I stayed in Birmingham last night. Our journey home in the morning was at a schedule relaxed enough to permit a proper look at this photography exhibition on the concourse of Birmingham New Street station, photos by Denis O’Regan of a gamut of rock icons from (seen here) the late David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Roger Daltrey and Spandau Ballet when the latter were still cool (surely Gary Kemp was never that young), and many more not depicted here. More railway stations should do this kind of thing if you ask me.
The gym I go to has a rotating exhibition of photographs or paintings and I put my name down to do it some time ago. In December I got a call saying my turn had come round so here we are, my first proper exhibition. You see here four of the smaller landscape photos, there are eighteen in total, eleven landscapes and seven wildlife pictures, some of which have been seen on the blog (the one on the left here is this shot of Helvellyn in the Lake District, from 2/12/11, for example). So I’m kind of proud of this and wanted it to be documented on here at some point. You also see here Phil, one of the gym regulars, the sort of bloke in his late fifties you know for a fact is about three times as healthy as yourself.
Skipped off work a bit early today and visited this exhibition which has is coming to the end of its run in the Deansgate library. It is the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication and also the 40th of the movie’s release. One of my favourite books and a very good film too. Joe is here a few minutes from discovering the giant white plastic phallus from the movie, the rear end of which is visible in the distance.
Being 42 