OUGD502: Personal Space Exhibition

I visited an exhibition titled ‘Personal Space’, hosted by Level 6 Photographers and Fine Artists at Art Hostel in Leeds. I was inspired by the collaborative environment and the tone of voice not taking the work too seriously, adding aspects of humour and the artists being free to speak to and share their ideas of the work. 

Throughout the exhibition there was use of video and sound stimuli to accompany the images, contributing towards the concept that artist Michael Savage was trying to demonstrate through his curation all about expressing the body and aspects of personal intimacy throughout. The sensitivity of the subject matter and originality the polaroid formats combine to create this a diverse relationship between the nostalgically historic form of photography and the context of living in the modern age, where streams of digital photographs are presented to us 24/7, often tampered with in their own way (photoshop) to create their own psudo-reality of the truth. ‘Inappropriate’ content is being hidden from the masses by the use of censorship on Instagram, yet the Personal Space exhibitions putting this content on full view, acting as the antithesis of Instagram for the willing participants.

The meaning of the work has experienced a shift from their capture to being presented in the exhibition space, the intimate scenes that it portrays made me feel like an intruder for photographing them myself as they were intimate to the photographers, reminding me of aspects of appropriation suggestive of artists such as Sally Mann. The feeling that was created by being inside an exhibition space made me realise how presenting work in a certain location can make the viewer feel different things towards it. The intimate space of the Art Hostel basement reflected the intimate, underground nature of the content. By curating an exhibition, the artist is controlling the process in which their work is being seen and therefore how the audience is interpreting the images, allowing the artists to form a psudo-reality around the images they are displaying to alter their perception. This idea of almost tampering with reality is of huge interest to myself, and I see lots of overlaps within visual merchandising and even set design, where the art director/VM is constructing the perfect setting for the goods to be displayed in- much like an exhibition setting. The exhibition was a great experience which i very freeing and expressive, showing the possibilities of Art and Photography a like in 'personal space'.