It Couldn’t Be Made Up - At Play
February 25th to February 28th 2008
Surface Gallery’s annual showcase of work by Nottingham Trent University’s Fine Art department starts this year with At Play.
One of the gallery’s busiest and most interesting events; This year’s NTU shows bring us 5 exhibitions in 4 weeks. The students have been asked to propose exhibitions in response to the theme It Couldn’t Be Made Up.
At Play
Monday 25th February from 6pm - Thursday 28th February
Through play we are able to indulge the fantastical and imagined, without consequence.
“At Play” will encourage both artists and the audience to revisit childhood notions of play, experimentation and interaction.
Physical engagement and direct communication is becoming less common in our every day lives. ‘Screen’ and lens-based media, computers and mobile phones, can often act as a barrier to keep people at arms length.
The artists will collaborate to create a terrain. This environment will evolve, from large-scale sculptural pieces, combined with more ephemeral sound and light installations. A temporal and atmospheric environment will be constructed.
The intension will not be to present separate works made by ‘individuals’ but use the gallery as a communal and collective space.
By removing individual accountability, contributing artists will combine their work to create one single piece that will fill the exhibition space.
Through physical engagement with something fabricated, the audience will begin to interact and experience a landscape, both real and imagined.
Events
As part of 'It Couldn’t Be Made Up - At Play', we held several events over the course of the exhibition. See below for further details.
Interventions and Performances
Throughout the programme there will also be a number of interventions and performances where mistaken identities, secret exchanges and absurd encounters occur in the gallery space and erupt into the public realm.
Includes work by Dominique Humphreys, Bill Nguyen and Alia Pathan.