Art Exhibitions

There are a number of Art Events taking place during the course of the festival.

Mission Gallery 25th Sept–6th Nov

Dark Star is a new exhibition by Swansea-based artist Jonathan Anderson. This first one-man show is a sculptural installation which draws upon archetypal
imagery, creating an anomalous slightly malevolent presence within the Mission Gallery space. Jonathan works with coal dust to create loaded, archetypal forms that provide an ideal vehicle for the exploration of poetic metaphor and transformation.

Anderson describes coal as ‘a dark, mysterious, almost mythical material’.
Mission Gallery, Gloucester Place, Maritime Quarter, Swansea SA1 1TY
Tel: 01792 652016 Open: daily 11am - 5pm

Locws International Projects 8th–31st Oct

To coincide with the Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts, three artists have been commissioned to produce new temporary artworks for public sites across the city, reflecting the artists’ responses to the people, culture, heritage or landscape of Swansea.

As part of the SA1 Swansea Waterfront Public Art Programme involving the GSP Partnership, Danish artist Tine Bech is working with the communities of St. Thomas, Grenfell Park and Port Tennant to develop an artwork for the area.

Bech’s work is concerned with how we engage with our immediate environment and is intentionally accessible to enable the audience to actively participate. Rebecca Spooner’s rich installations combine film, photography, projection and found objects. Her work explores the romanticism of nature, in particular the symbolism of animals and the landscape, and their capacity to convey unconscious desires and sensual metaphors.

Simon Whitehead's work is concerned with a primary physical engagement with land and the qualities of season, people and place: existing outside the usual art institution, Whitehead interfaces directly with lived and sensory experiences, through which the audience may participate or become witness.

www.artacrossthecity.com With Support from The Arts Council of Wales, SA1 Swansea Waterfront and the City & County of Swansea.

 

Oriel Ceri Richards Gallery 1st Oct–6th Nov Transience and Transformation (Tempo Variabile)

The work of Michael Freeman, a native of Swansea, has been greatly influenced by both his profound love of music and by living within sight of the sea. Throughout his work is the sense of things seen, though the images themselves defy description.

‘His paintings tackle large subjects bravely, with a frank beauty and an emotional range which belies their small, but always perfectly appropriate physical size’. [Phillip Thomas]

 

Art and Pasta - Sun 10th October Meet outside Guildhall - Coach leaves 10.30am

Coach departs for a tour of Festival visual art exhibitions at various City galleries and locations, followed by a pasta lunch.

Ticket prices

£15 including lunch and a glass of wine

Tickets (limited to 50) from Grand Theatre Box Office must be booked by 23rd September.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Cale Dyddiau Du/Dark Days - At the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 8 October - 7 November 2010

Show and Museum open daily from 10am – 5pm

Admission free thanks to the support of the Welsh Assembly Government

A first showing in Wales of the work created by John Cale - the invited artist for Wales at the 53rd Biennale of Art in Venice in 2009.

John Cale is primarily known for his music and involvement with bands from the seminal Velvet Underground in New York to the present day. He was born in Garnant, near Ammanford. In Dyddiau Du/ Dark Days he has made an audio-visual work which is a reflection on the pain and power of a cultural inheritance and its contradictions and meaning for him.

The work, made as Wales’ contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale of Art, takes the form of four episodes in film and sound across five screens. It was made in several locations in Wales including the unoccupied former family home, and with the collaborations of a choir and young orchestral players.

Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian, May 12 2009:
“I am transfixed. This is fantastic. It was one thing hearing Cale talk about his return home, another watching this raw material transformed… The images in Dyddiau Du/Dark Days are lucid and exact, but it is the audio that makes this film extraordinary. In effect, Cale has created a filmed concept album and called it an artwork. It is utterly compelling, deeply felt.”

Dyddiau Du/Dark Days has a playing time of 46minutes, starting on the hour with no admissions after the beginning of the piece. It contains scenes which some will find disturbing. Children should be 12+ or accompanied.

Dyddiau Du / Dark Days was commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales. Additional support from the Welsh Assembly Government has made possible a collaboration with Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales to tour the work and through the additional generosity of the artist, present it to the national collection. Following its first showing in Wales, at Swansea, it will be shown in summer 2011, as part of the opening of the extended new art galleries at National Museum Cardiff.