Dreams and Nostalgia is actually two exhibitions.
The first part - Nostalgia created by older people, the local commune residents and artists and second part is – big art project for the young people and young artist.
The concept of the exhibition centres on individuals and their personal stories, histories, belongings, creativity and dreams. I have taken inspiration from explores the emotional, physical, ideological and imaginative in relation to the people and space. The exhibition will show the intersections between people, objects and events by bringing together people at different stages of life whose experiences and personal histories have been informed by a variety of social environments.
In order to physically communicate these ideas the exhibition will show the work in a diversity of art forms including paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, mixed media installation, music and garden activities. I plan to stage big ‘living’ installations consisting from individual artist’s small installations by spreading some modern day artistic and art historical ideas and theories (as Social Turn and Museums Without Walls for example) reflections on various themes and issues together with the collection of young artists art. I believe that the inclusion and mixture of young artist’s work, older resident’s installations and world famous artist’s art bound together by the same underlying themes would only broaden my target audience and strengthen the overall impact of my exhibition.
The exhibition will explore ideas of utopianism, philanthropy, human mental conditions, dreams, nostalgia, and relationship between people of the different age groups to create a dreamlike environment and ‘living’ exhibitions. The exhibition reflects upon the notion of ‘young people dreams’ as opposed to ‘older people nostalgia’.
The art work in the exhibition will constitute an exploration into the realm of a recollected home, presenting visitors with memories, fragments of personal belongings and inexplicable apparitions that inform visitor’s connection to a particular place and time that might eventually be understood as ‘life’.
The viewers will have something to think about as they walk around the galleries alongside their opinions on the works themselves. Also, practically this concept will give me all a clear direction; allow me to be controversial and therefore open up the boundaries when it comes to advertising and events planning.
A selection of different type of art works will illustrate how an ordinary people’s dreams about the future and nostalgic feelings about their past can inspire the imagination and force people to create something very personal and touching, or even shocking and paradoxically disturbing. Every personality has been often very lonely and unhappy during some life time period or the opposite: very happy and very creative.
From the past we reflect upon our own lives, our own narratives and the stories of our identity. In each case, such a tale is never completely linear: there up and downs, convulsions and revulsion, happiness, love, sadness, struggle and strife. No one story is ever the same. We all undertake the same process; we look at the best parts of ourselves in the past and yearn to recreate them. The loss of time itself is compensated by the idealised nature of our memories and as such we begin to become aware of nostalgia as something quite beneficent and positive.
Art from a Heart as a part of Dreams exhibition
The imaginary art exhibition as a part of Dreams and Nostalgia for a children and young people (right side of building)
Jasek Yerka – will be artist in residence at the art exhibition and four rooms will present his art.
Big spaces at the right side of the building will be art studios for young artists and every volunteer artist can create their own image of Dreams at the canvas. All canvas will be exactly the same size and presented at the walls in the salon style “from the floor to ceiling”……
Livergarden is a space to investigate creative collaboration, through this living museum and galleries, community events, international residency program and educational initiatives. As part of the exhibition, Art from a Heart will be a ‘creative factory’ for young people and secretly (anonymous) for the invited famous artists.
It will be never-ending ongoing art exhibition and art studios and the completed canvases will sell at charity auctions.
It will be a symmetrical display of the paintings on the Dreams gallery walls. The paintings will be produced by young artists, they have identical size frames and only three primary colours (blue, red and yellow) of acrylics paint. The lessons and workshops with visual instructions about how to mix acrylics will be on a big screen on the gallery wall.
Art from a Heart is a virtual (will be) registered charity unique to Liverpool Livergarden Commune. It (will be) established in 2012 and due to its positive impact, continues to be offered as part of the Merseyside region Community Programme.
The charity programme encourages Liverpool’s school pupils to make a positive contribution to the local community by visiting residential care homes and other venues to facilitate a range of art experiences. This provides a source of creative stimulation, encourages social interaction which fosters mutual respect between the young and old and enables the generational gap to be bridged through the art making process.
The project Art from a heart runs weekly and pupils visit Livergarden Community to provide with local residents and visitors art workshops in their own surroundings. The workshops are free and open to all levels and abilities.
The art workshops range from drawing and painting through to collage, mosaic, collage, pottery, glass painting, gardening, textile crafts and card making.
The future plans are to expand the scheme, inviting other schools from across the UK to adopt Art from a Heart and deliver it in their local communities to ensure that more pupils and older people experience the benefits.
I, as a curator have taken inspiration from Elsewhere Art Community. Elsewhere is a living museum set inside a former thrift store in Greensboro town, North Carolina, USA. Incredible building housing one woman's 58 year collection of thrift and surplus has become a living art installation over a 9 year period.
This experimental approach and especially the sensitivity to the physical and private properties of the exhibition and commune should influence an entire generation of younger artists in my opinion.
The aim of my Dreams and Nostalgia exhibition is to show classic and modern art, create new art during the exhibition and in doing so reveal work which evokes real memories, big dreams and real emotions. I have no wish to show the world as an utopian place or as scary and uglier than it already is sometimes, I wish to present art that captures a real set of human values and emotions – the “soul altar” of the artists.
The visitors may at first wonder whether this is an art exhibition at all. The huge space is filled with different kind of new and shabby chic tables, chairs, sofas, lampposts, bins and even red Royal mail post boxes and phone boxes placed in the middle of the room (very huge size room!) in a traditional or nostalgic coffee shops in the street pattern. They resemble some as sea side promenade or French streets cafe, and the space becomes reminiscent of a town under the roof. For residents of the commune (who live in an en-suite apartments in the first and second floor of the building) it is a huge "living room" and personal art studios and an exhibition space, for visitors it is a “street under the roof” and space with a lot of different styles tea rooms and coffee shops in the middle of the exhibition space and the ‘living’ art studio spaces and an art installations along the walls.
It can be a fascinating exhibition in which the living installation and display of the art works is as important and thought provoking as the buildings space themselves. The curation of the show will reveals how the reading and understanding of a meaning of “art” and work of art is dependent on the way in which it is exhibited. The tea and coffee shops tables become “platforms for display” the discussions and The Social Turn movement in the contemporary art, (Claire Bishop in The social turn: collaboration and its discontents published in Art Forum in 2006, analysing the tension between faith in art’s autonomy and the belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world – (Bishop,pp.178-183)
The unfinished and ready art installations and canvases are hung to the walls of the gallery or displayed on the easels are treated almost as an religious or spiritual objects. This is will be a deliberate ploy and what at first appears to be a seemingly still life installation space become performing art space when artist has shown on and became to improve the installation or change something or even just sit there and read the book. This entire are significantly challenges the exhibition ideas.
Exit Through the Gift Shop, named Banksy his provocative new film.
‘Entering and exit to the exhibition are through the Tea and Coffee shops’ can be a motto of the design of The Nostalgia art exhibition.
Aside from this reflective sense of nostalgia and memorabilia, ideas around travelogue trought the life time, the recording of experience and memory, and its re-contextualisation in the Nostalgia art galleries and living museum as a context for articulation and archival processing, are all relevant to this project. Internal and psycological aspects of human beengs aging and desire to share the memoures, including memoures from the journeys and family memorabilia and an old communication tools such as old telephones, TV sets, radio, an old record players and an old records sound of music also become spatial and temporal parameters that relate to ideas around the exhibition concept, while notions of personal history are re-worked and abstracted further away and formulated into new definitions of materiality, time and space.
This exhibition is the local commune residents-artist’s first regional exhibition in the UK(?), and the result of a two years residency period in Livergarden commune, which has been created within the context of The Social Turn. The work it contains aims to extend ideas of communes "Aging Together" set of narratives around the UK, to become a cogitation on the recent history of a town that’s currently undergoing a radical transformation through dramatic regeneration plans.
The title of the exhibition ‘Nostalgia' - relates to the nature of certain urban conditions as well (the ageing population) and how these contextualise a new form of solitude an older and vulnerable people living.
Within the gallery we find an old lampposts, green trees planters and the light fixture situated above a large old clock and old, red, traditional phone box and Royal mail post box; this attempts to evoke an appropriated and accelerated urban environment and translate temporal and personal history, or the interior world of the artists, into the present; a comment on change, urban history, as well as the politics of local regeneration.
Entering the huge exhibition space, passage is unexpectedly channelled by several flats behind the walls, rectangular patches different sizes and shapes titled ‘artist's space’ and ‘artist's kitchen’, initiating a dialogue with the audience by demanding visitors attention. Sound of the old record music, an old English town appearance, magic expectation and ‘old neighbour’ is sitting in one corner reading paper… There are a washing line, hanging near the ceiling and old movies posters which depicts the black and white ’50-60’s style films. An elderly man and woman holding each other hand are seating in the bench near street's lamp post. Puzzled and nevertheless amused, the visitors moves across the gallery space to find the most convenient place for a cup of tea… Or maybe they are already lost in time and space?
There are endless variety of the tea tables and chairs and a lot of different styles small tea and cake shops in the exhibition.
Who shapes and created this space? It arranged as a treasure hunt-like game, each possessing their own raison d’etre and yet connected to each other. Through nostalgic association with old everyday objects, the show triggers analysis of visitors perceptions - the way we have been taught to think,ask and respond, and the logic that exists prior to experience. The work here presents a plea for sustained consideration as a way to ‘see’ in order to make the invisible visible, and to encourage one to go beyond conventional meanings and values ascribed to matter. The exhibited ‘objects’ are memory carriers, working as reminders of the past.
The media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s said: "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."
In some rooms an art objects embodied in forms of installations strongly associated with sub-cultural communities of 60s, personal memorials or historical obscurities. The nostalgic influence of the old objects and unusually contemporary pieces in installations, as modern plazma TV framed in the oldfashioned frame near black-and-white old photo on the wall stark compositions belies the uneasy and fraught allusions of appropriated images and forms reconstructed as vessels of oblivion.
The exhibition title Nostalgia already suggests the main features of the art work: the old, rudimentary, seemingly useless and unfinished or everyday used objects consist of simple items removed from any and all functional context in the reality. The objects of installations are reference in merely a few words the curious combinations of fairytale-like and fabulous materials and objects, puzzling backgrounds and seemingly absurd actions.
The artists and art work I have chosen, all seek to evoke a sense of empathy from the viewer; where the experience of engaging in the art is always emotionally worthwhile. With artists from all over the world my message from an art exhibition is not drawn from one cultural perspective, but many.
Titanic’s 100th Anniversary (for Nostalgia exhibition):
The Grand Ocean liner, Titanic, sank during its journey on April 15, 1912. The death toll was 1523 of the 2228 passengers and crew members aboard. There were only 705 that survived. But there is more to the story of the Titanic than just the sinking. There is the connection people feel when they open their hearts to the event. One room of the exhibition will show Titanic related art works.
Target audience at the exhibition will be very different. It will be interesting for a future development of ongoing art exhibitions to research how school children and young people from the “right wing” of the building where “The Dreams” exhibition will take place would be interesting to go and explore the “left wing” of building where “Nostalgia” exhibition will be presented.
The research and statistical strategies as questionnaire and surveys are effective but I decided to invent something new and unusual for research. I decided to install in the entering hall of the building several vending machine – free fortune reading with freebies as a plastic fortune cookies gifted in the end of questioning. The display on the “machine” will ask few questions about exhibition and visitors will be simple press “yes” or “no” or choose from ready answers suitable answers. It will be hiding survey and the playing style cybernetic questionnaire.
The visitors will watch the carpenter repair and produce luggage similar to that taken on the Titanic and can to explore how the carpenter earns his living through the use of a traditional craft and learn about his vital contribution to the local neighbourhood. While Titanic was built and fitted out in the industrial shipyard, many carpenters would have benefited from related trade.
Not everyone in the big city as Liverpool are got their own garden to enjoy work there or just for pleasure to see how the flowers, berries and vegetables growing. In the Livergarden residents and visitors can explore all gardening activities from planting and watering till pulling weeds and harvest vegetables, berries and fruits.
What is more important the Livergarden exhibition will be permanent and “living” exhibition and visitors will be feel very safe there during their visit because it will be good security and retired police workers will be residents in the commune as a retired police horses (horse stables in the garden) as well.
The young people audience will be invited from the school and colleges and Livergarden visits can be as perfect school activities for pupils and teachers.
In the garden will be displayed Niki de Saint Phalle Nanas sculptures - White Nana, Black Nana, Yellow Nana and Red Nana – as a symbol and strategy of contemporary communities – living together in harmony, diversity and equality.
