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ABOVE : James Baldwin Quote ''EVERYONE YOU'RE LOOKING AT IS ALSO YOU' Still Moving at The Plymouth Art Weekender 2024.

Plymouth Art Weekender 2024 | Devon and Cornwall Art and Event Photography

Techno tubas, the modern family, A.I, machine learning, Turner, light, the landscape and how we are changing it, the old and the new, moor and sea, social media, representation, war and faces, public community art, whispered performances and Grange Hill Gabba, all made an appearance at this years Plymouth Art Weekender in a showcase of work from local and national artists, for three days across the city.

 

ABOVE: LAND SEA SKY at The Box Plymouth Art Weekender 2024

I had begun Friday's documentation on Thursday visiting the Royal William Yard, KARST, Lo Profile's work behind the scrap store and Still Moving's installation of the James Baldwin Quote 'EVERYONE YOU'RE LOOKING AT IS ALSO YOU' across Old Town and New George Street. Baldwin was of course talking about personal responsibility and choice. Art, whatever you think of it is at the very least, a chance to see what it is to 'be that monster' or 'be that cop'. A chance to walk in somebody else's shoes and see not just through the eye of the artist, but when it is really doing it's job, to see through the eyes of the subject or feel the breath that animates both on your shoulder. Art gives you permission to see further than yourself and feel closer to now, rather than drowning in nostalgia or dreaming about tomorrow.

ABOVE: 'Acid Brass' Afterparty Plymouth Art Weekender 2024

ABOVE : Simon Dobson conducting The Camborne Town Brass Band in rehearsal at Plymouth Art Weekender 2024

Music does this almost instantly and imperceptibly, a familiar sea of experience that we have all swam in. Visual and performance art have to work harder to first make you forget that, while it may be representative of something or someone, the aim of the artist is usually to get you to share in their moment of revelation and truly immerse yourself in an experience that may not be your own.

Sometimes the easiest way to untie a knot is to start at the middle and so I will begin on Saturday at 1pm with the technical rehearsal of Jeremy Deller's 'Acid Brass' with conductor Simon Dobson and The Camborne Town Brass Band at St Lukes in Tavistock Place.The concept is a good one. A performance of that most demographic and community driven musical movement, Acid House and Techno by a Brass Band, that traditional town and city family of musicians that warm the hearts of workers who by day are entombed in freezing caverns, loading trucks with cold steel, or down here on this windy peninsula, going out to haul in skin shredding nets from finger numbing icy waters.

It is not, for me at least, a resounding success. With something as polite as 808 State's 'Pacific 202' there is enough common ground to feel some concordance. The original's Synth Brass was always more Shopping Mall muzak, than smoky Jazz club authenticity, and while here in Plymouth we are all familiar with how alienating and cold an out of time and place shopping mall can be, when any Brass Band plays Derrick May's 'Strings of Life' there is no simple way to reinstate the same sense of ecstatic desolation that one of the Detroit Godfathers baptised the infant scene with. 'Strings of Life' is as radical and orthodox for dance music as Schoenberg or Stravinsky were in the Classical world, yet Deller’s adaptation has made Derrick May seem about as threatening as a cuddle from Andre Rieu.

ABOVE :DJ Jon DaSilva and DJ Verdi at Plymouth Art Weekender 2024

That 8 Bit Ensonique aggression is totally smoothed over by the breath of a brass band. You can articulate it with more staccato than a Bernard Hermann Shower Scene, but it still isn't going to do the same job. The starting point in techno is speculation about what is not there. The Afro futurist manifesto of Electro and Hip Hop with Record Decks and Boom-boxes and even Dancers out of the clubs and onto the cold urban streets was not a passing trend. Not just ‘No future’ but no humans either. A Brass Band is far too present and real to replicate that glacial isolation or the clipped cut-off that deadheads notes into the vacuum of dead space, in a warehouse full of B-boys and football hooligans, united by just how sh*t life was outside.

Acid House was always much more about the sound and the environments it evolved in than the notes. What many loved about techno was it's ability to be so musical and yet cold, all embracing and yet unique and underground. A step change in musical expression, whilst also often removing the need for musicians all together. Here the musicians are front and centre and Deller wants us to enjoy it as a kind of event in place of an object.

Many producers making Techno and Acid in 1987 were not enjoying their life. Even avid listeners were not always convinced or enthralled until dropping more than their preconceptions on the dance floor. That same strange juxtaposition is absent when blown through rounded shiny warm nostalgic brass in an authorised venue, and the disconnect that is here never truly resolves itself into a shared experience.

ABOVE : The Camborne Town Brass Band in rehearsal PAW 2024

When the final track on Moby's 'Play' had been used to sell us all stuff, it was not so much the final nail in the coffin, as the final shovel full of earth stamped down six feet above it. Here Deller's repackaging for the now middle aged, mediocre class of muddled consumers, does nothing to invoke the disparate community camaraderie, that lets not forget, began with sometimes desperate eroticism in clubs so far removed from the establishment courted here. The absence of swing, in the marching kick fours of techno, has been replaced by an over quantised protest, the art itself pasteurised and sanitised beyond recognition, and that is a real missed opportunity.

I do not want any of this to sound like a criticism of the energy and conviction of Simon Dobson and the Camborne Town Brass Band, who were magnificent in their dedication and aptitude, or even the team that made this happen. It is the work itself for me that is missing the danger, empathy and cross tribal anti- authority attitude that made the musical revolution stamp it’s mark across the decades. Dobson is equally at home with the grooves that swing inside the heart of Funk, Soul and Dance Music as he is when the pendulum swings back the other way into the dark percussive and dramatic scores that elevate the alternative rock and metal bands who are lifted by the Parallax Orchestra. His original compositions for Brass Bands are gorgeous, often elegiac emotion drenched paeans to heroes and victims made human with the poetry of his scrupulously scored stanzas. Deller’s piece is though, rather two dimensional and impossible to animate or elevate much, even with this radical re-contextualisation.

ABOVE : 'ANYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF / EVERYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE' LOW PROFILE for the 2024 Plymouth Art Weekender

LOW PROFILE have been doing even doing more with even less, as they move through their career, continuing to offer lessons in sartorial simplicity. In bold black capital letters their work at the rear of Plymouth Scrap Store reads 'ANYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF / EVERYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE', depending on whether you are looking at the concertina garage door from either the left or right hand side. More than just a celebration of the ethos and people who make the scrap store such a valuable resource but also, (maybe inadvertently), a prescient lesson in the obfuscation present when inhabiting one viewpoint, as opposed to the possibilities presented when looking at the same thing in a different way. When art nurtures empathy in the way that Low Profile’s publicly engaged work does, the community PAW is there for, are not just presented with a real hopeful sense of optimism, they are a part of the work that reflects their own lives back at them.

 

ABOVE : Mirror Gallery at UAP

The Bloomberg New Contemporaries in it’s 75th Anniversary year, and in it’s first return to Plymouth in 60 years, exhibited in MIRROR, KARST and THE LEVINSKY GALLERY. Back in 1964 the exhibition was called 'Young Contemporaries' and Alexander Mackenzie had just begun teaching at what was then called Plymouth College of Art (previously Plymouth Institution of Art, now Arts University Plymouth). Inside Arts University Plymouth’s MIRROR Gallery, Sara Osman's moving 'The Battle for Home' surprised me with it's emotional impact. The crumbling edifice of faux domestic bliss mirroring not just the broken family, but also fittingly the shell of Charles Church across the road from it. A reminder that the bombs falling on Gaza and Lebanon are launched by broken people. Frail, dried husks, shells of men, talking and walking but crumbling as they do so, all trace of blood, vitality and warmth long gone from their calcified veins.

ABOVE : Sara Osman's 'The Battle For Home' at UAP 2024

The family is a theme returned to over at The Levinsky Gallery where Rhoos Dhissou's 'Eat, Drink, Chill, but don't hurt anyone's heart',2023, sees a table set with slogan covered napkins and text covered plates, basking in the window on North Hill. A discussion of feminism, food toxicity, waste, and solidarity, the installation smartly addresses the question of what is acceptable or not acceptable to bring up at the dinner table, by removing all the diners and leaving the contents of that discourse as leftovers cooling on the plate. Part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries The Levinsky Gallery is also running Sun Oh's 'Dinner with Family', a 2021 short claustrophobic film, depicting a potentially crushing, slowly descending monolith compressing a family from above. An effective metaphor for the looming pressures of oppressive regimes, external financial forces, and the mounting environmental disasters looming over us all, it again shows a family not talking, even without the obligatory cellphones.

ABOVE : 'Eat, Drink, Chill but don't hurt anyone's heart' Rhoos Dhissou at the 2024 Weekender

Humanity is something PAW does well. Somewhere where Plymouth Arts Club can rub shoulder to shoulder against the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. The Blockhouse Photo Census can go up against the masterful light infused landscapes of JMW TURNER. It is a breath of fresh air to be able to walk into an artists studio or house to buy, create or watch work be made on the same weekend that national works of such magnitude are revealed and shared with the public of Plymouth in more formal ways.

ABOVE : UAP Palace Studios at PAW 2024

We are hugged on one side by the sea and on the other by Dartmoor, and both were represented here. With the UAP students response to Dartmoor 'Place' printed and fixed to the windows of Palace studios, Dartmoor artists themselves exhibiting in Manor Street and Alan Qualtrough photoplymoregravure images of the moor on display at the Royal William Yard. The Sea was here also in ‘Moving, Swirling Waters’ at the immersive dome in Market Hall and Pollution Art (John Dixon) exhibiting at The New Cooperage building as part of Artober. His reclaimed beach plastics often displayed in grids, the bottle top Hirst like spot group, the abstract geometric nurdles vortex and plastic fragments arranged like the vertebra of some small lost dinosaur. The environment is commented upon both explicitly and more subtly across the city by the Beverly Duckworth's Residue, 2024 a landfill landscape, moss covered piles of clothes and textiles at KARST, Jordan Spray Saint's purple Tiger, and by Judy Harington's ‘Insatiable’.

ABOVE: John Dixon AKA Poluution Art at Artober New Cooperage Building RWY at PAW 2024

Luminosity is a curious quality, the word seeming even more dimmed when written down. Often used to describe the banal and everyday, light bulbs and paint, it sometimes struggle to endow the subjects it describes with any of the great potential the word promises, like struggling to read Christmas Annuals by fairy and fire light alone.

Judy Harington's ‘Insatiable’ enlightens the conservation conversation, and lifts it off the page, her lifebuoy like figures, bloated with fragmented microplastics floating ominously within the dark Melville building. A stark warning that in our rush to consume and fill that material hole we are all ingesting the automated cyborg flesh we all help create. Our fear of AI, robots and their existential threat, is obscuring our open arm acceptance of the android in our pocket and it’s role in the plasticization of our once inflexible determination to stop the march of an unstoppable plastic army that will overwhelm the natural world.

ABOVE: Judy Harington's 'Insatiable' at PAW 2024

Elliott Roy's 'A Content Replaces Another' at the Levinsky Gallery demonstrates this role reversal in which we are now the pupils subjected to the lessons the machine learning algorithms are programming us to willingly carry out. An 8 minute and 19 second reel of Instagram and Tik Tok content, reimagined in a giant phone like vertical format display screen, reshot as though it were destined for Netflix.

ABOVE : Alison Stott's 'Lucent' at PAW 2024

Alison Stott’s ‘Lucent’ is a tale of two halves. The first room with it’s rotating coloured glass discs combining to create new forms as they twist and distort the light beam that passes through them onto the cream brick walls and matt black screen that covers the window. And then the second room in which variously shaped and textured, clear and coloured glass globes hang, not unlike a lampshade / lighting display in a hardware store. The first is playful and balletic, an abbreviated orrery, atmospheric refraction served by glass, it’s heliocentricity replaced with a white light that is more cinematic in it’s simple projection than electromagnetic in it’s radiation. The second room is rather empty of meaning or feeling, at least for me.

ABOVE : Katy Richardson at SOAK LIVE ART PAW 2024

The bright lights used in the SOAK LIVE ART event at Plymouth University’s ‘The House’ Theatre / Event space were extinguished for Katy Richardson's haunting ‘Last Quarter’. Lit by a single candle and the subtle film behind her, the almost whispered narration, burbling and flowing like the projected water, the rustling soft susurration of her voice pulling you through like a dark undercurrent tugging at your feet as you wade deeper and deeper, sinking into the calm embrace of what now felt like a sacred space. If anyone had been foolhardy enough to drop a pin we would have all heard it, so quiet was the reverence the audience held her in.

ABOVE : 'Blood orange' at SOAK LIVE ART PAW 2024

Amber George and Bradley Gunness' acidic and zesty 'Blood Orange' showcased the young actors range and willingness to provoke and entertain with a simple set up served in segments, under a white spotlight that ended in an infrared darkroom like light state, with both actors on the floor rubbing fake blood with oranges.

ABOVE : Rachel Gipetti at SOAK LIVE ART in 2024

Rachel Gipetti's mesmerising cassette driven poetic monologue is delivered in a way that reminded me of that moment as a child when you try to catch your voice in your hand, or in the corner of a room. I remember it being most keenly felt as a six year old on hearing of the death of Elvis, lying in bed my head against the wall trying to imitate that booming baritone and realising that the low G he could shake your hips with, was not an affectation but part of what made him who he truly was. That sense of realising what is you and how you will carry that idea of self with you always, is here in spades. Exploring the crossover between health, illness and wellness, her poetic delivery wraps you up and lulls you in.

Delivered over cassette tapes from her own childhood, Rachel Gipetti seems completely at ease with who it is that goes to make up her, and so when she recounts holding the hand of her dying mother or lying in a hospital bed herself, you feel that you are there with her, a performance so contained and intimate, it feels like an adult lullaby and meditation rolled in to one.

ABOVE : Nurai Bonet at Soak Live Art at Plymouth's 'The House' 2024.

Nuria Bonet's hilarious camp musical lecture, was so effective and funny in puncturing over inflated musical egos, that it reminded me of Kenny Everett bursting Rod Stewart's over inflated bottom and that is a real tribute when exploding any balloons of pomposity. It was not the only musical lecture this weekend, Damsonic opening the launch part on Friday with their fantastic power-point disco, an ode to electronic esoterica. Something that combined two of my favourite things, reading and not dancing. Delia Derbyshire is always delightful, doubly so in a show that ended with DJ Hip.P playing Grange Hill Gabba whilst being sabotaged by technology with a mind of it’s own, determined not to play nicely.

ABOVE : Spray Saint's latest wall art for PAW 2024

It has been four years since the last Plymouth Art Weekender. In that same year lockdowns ended, Sir Nicolas Serota opened The Box, and I had the privilege of speaking to Sir Antony Gormley about his newly revealed sculpture ‘Look II’ on West Hoe Pier. The Box has already proved to be a real jewel in this city, reflecting it’s many faceted stories and the stories of those who live within her. Demonstrating that Art really is for everyone and that Plymouth should not believe it’s only light is that housed within the lighthouse. In a modern evolving city, it’s ambition now firmly illuminated on the cultural map, The Box and it’s sister venue St Lukes have provided that hub from which these new spokes of art now radiate. 'Look II' or Rusty Reg as many now call it, has shown the value of of looking out toward an ever changing horizon and the Plymouth Art Show in 2024 has once again thrown open it’s arms to all in this city by the sea, giving us a new perspective and permission to see further than ourselves and the everyday minutiae that make up our lives.

ABOVE: Plymouth Art Club at Leadworks Plymouth Art Weekender 2024

Here is to next year, and another weekend of recognising, celebrating and indulging the senses in three days of art and creativity, that speaks to Plymouth and all that visit her over the duration.

ABOVE : 'Love Community ' sign at Plymouth Art Weekender 2024

ABOVE : Dartmoor artists exhibiting in Manor Street PAW2024

ABOVE: Nuria Bonet at The House for SOAK LIVE ART in 2024

If you would like to book me to capture your opening night or other art events, you can contact me HERE

You can find more Plymouth Art Weekender 2024 photographs in the facebook gallery here

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