- Venue
- Mostyn
- Location
- Wales
We Have The Mirrors, We Have The Plans: Oriel Mostyn Gallery
The current exhibition was planned to celebrate the reopening of the Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno after it was closed in 2007. The works on show are from twenty five artists from Wales and overseas and reflect a wide range of fine art; video and sound installation, film, painting and sculpture, installation, found and appropriated objects, photography, wallpaper and print.
From a warm, bustling, Victorian seaside resort, one enters the Gallery, incidentally posing as a red brick post office, into a completely unexpected environment filled with light and lines of architecture both inviting and generous.
The team that brought the exhibition together weaved within it a number of threads which link relatively disparate contemporary art works; stimulate critical debate and exploration of contemporary art by not supplanting existing cultural theory but shifting the axis and perception of the viewer.
Using the book ‘Ideas that Changed the World’, by Felipe Fernandez -Armesto, the artists individually selected around ten ideas that contributed to their project.
Armesto’s ‘ Ideas’ range from pre-history to the present day and a brief analysis of the catalogue cover shows that many of the artists chose some of the oldest change ideas. ‘Parting the Mist’ raises the issue of perception, illusion and truth. It feeds imagination and the notion of possibilities and potential. It serves us well.
Naomi Leake’s ‘Wind Street’ is a powerful video. My analysis included ‘nothing matters’, the idea of purposelessness and ‘drowning the deer’ the notion of sacrifice, and excluded several of her ‘ideas’. This raises the possibility that we carry some ideas with us regardless and don’t notice them.
This exhibition is refreshing and important for many reasons not least of which is that it legitimizes our questions; we are not just gazing and experiencing. Artists may have the plans but we now have tools and potential.
Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2003) IDEAS that changed the world, London, DK
Oriel Mostyn Gallery (2010) We Have The Mirrors, We Have The Plans [exhibition catalogue]
Llandudno, Mostyn
Dorothy Harrison
Fd A&D Glyndwr University
