Your guide to art exhibitions and events in Brighton this week.
Brighton is a city renowned for its artistic heritage. From the iconic Victorian architecture of the front, to the boundary-pushing work being made in the city’s many galleries, the city by the sea is one of colour, expression, and innovation.
This week we have hand picked four of the best exhibitions and live events happening in this Indian summer flourish.
Unhappy Hour, by Jamie Watt
Nadir Project Spacae, Saturdays & Sundays Until October
Nadir Project Space presents Unhappy Hour. An exhibition of sculptural and installation-based works from artist Jamie Watt.
Drawing on a darkly comedic and socially-conscious ethos, Jamie’s practice is an exploration of class, cultural tribalism, and the aporia of mental health within capitalism. He uses historic imagery, narratives and folklore as vehicles to examine the above topics. Informed by discourse on Capitalist Realism, Neo-Medievalism, and by combining the iconography of disparate epochs (drawing heavily from his native Scotland) his work articulates personal and collective anxieties conjured by our contemporary world.
Learn more about the exhibition here.
Follow Jamie Watt on Instagram here.
Adapt & Adjust, by Difficult Darkroom Womxn
Regency Town House, Tuesday 12th – Sunday 19th
‘Adapt and Adjust’ is a presentation of mixed techniques and projects developed throughout the Photography MA at Brighton University.
Adapt and Adjust is a show born out of necessity (just as the collective itself was). With ongoing restrictions in place at the university the members have completed their MA without any opportunities to exhibit physical manifestations of their work to the public, in place of a ‘final show’ this small collective have prepared finished examples of the analogue photography projects that they have been working on.
The title of this show has come to reflect the notions of literal and figurative compromise and transformation that form the base line of all these works. After almost two years of consistently reshaping their practice, the DDW have reconciled with the fact their work carries strong visual representations of physical and emotional acts of contortion, balance and reformation. The phrase Adapt and Adjust has been reappropriated here by the DDW not only in order to reclaim and highlight how unusual the completion of their Masters course has been, but to specifically focus on their supportive development and research methods .
DDW want to produce work which is not only faithful to their desires, but work that is also developed and distilled into subtle and interesting visual experiences for the viewer. The show Adapt and Adjust takes what started out as four seemingly disparate artistic practices and aims to show how through a passion for each others work, that visual cohesion between the members is possible. Over the course of the last eighteen months there have been many threads that the artists have been able to draw between each others work, be that through common modes of artistic production, through shared interests or recurring themes.
Difficult Darkroom Womxn was formed during the turmoil of the first national lockdown last year. The current members of the group: Abigail Evans, Esme Follas-Shell, Ola Teper and Sofia Smith, are all met during their MA in Photography at Brighton and first came together in order to provide moral support for each other as the conditions of our education were changing rapidly. The show will consist of mixed photographic techniques along with presentations of visual research.
Learn more about the exhibition here.
Diviners, by Hermione Allsop and Poppy Whatmore
The Phoenix Art Space, 4th-27th September
Hermione Allsopp typically makes sculptural work by collecting objects and furniture and re-creating them into new forms or compositions. These items, which have been discarded in charity shops, become her materials. Not inert ones, but ones that carry collective memories and meanings. As sculpture, they begin to exist as something else, raising questions over value of rejected objects, the materiality of memory related to interior space and the junk economy.
Poppy Whatmore subverts and deconstructs the conventional uses of everyday objects. These objects include tables, flat pack furniture, applying DIY materials which are manipulated and reconfigured in dialogue with reconstructions highlighting and examining mundane elements of the commonplace. The process intends to re-appropriate conventional forms into alternative arrangements, offering new codes and language, in particular in relation to modernist tropes.
Learn more about the exhibition here.
In between Gallery, ft Ibrahim Azab
Fabrica Gallery, on all month
The In Between Gallery is a temporary gallery in the Fabrica window showing contemporary photography between Fabrica’s main exhibition programme.
Ibrahim Azab is a multi-disciplinary artist and curator based in London. Azab’s practice shifts between Sculpture, Performance and Photography whilst engaging in Ideas of re-construction and memory. His work explores the photograph as object, through digital and physical intervention, with a focus towards the movement and exchange of visual language and the abstract in consumer culture.
Brighton Undercurrent 