About

NTU FESTIVAL: The Faraway Nearby
15th – 25th March 2017
Opening Nights: Tuesday 14th, 6pm-8pm, and Tuesday 21st March, 6pm-8pm

This March sees the return of Surface Gallery’s annual collaboration with Nottingham Trent University with the sixth NTU Festival: The Faraway Nearby. Following the success of last year’s NTU Festival, As if by Magic, this year’s selected Fine Art students explore concepts such as distance/closeness, separateness/togetherness. Their responses are showcased in four week-long exhibitions.

The NTU Festival offers selected Fine Art students the opportunity to curate a group exhibition that establishes their practice outside of the university. Surface Gallery provides a supportive and professional environment for the students to plan and show their work. Two exhibitions will run concurrently in each week of the festival.

Week One
Safety Net
Joseph Winsborrow and Amethyst Jennings
Exhibition: 15th – 18th March, Main Gallery
Opening Night: Tuesday 14th March, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Safety Net, through referencing internet culture, creates a quasi-digital bedroom of your pink-filled fantasies. The physical space of the bedroom combined with the vast intangible expanse of the web allows for experimentation with personas, identity, and glorifying our daily lives. The relationship between the bedroom and the Internet creates safe havens for us to play. This exhibition highlights individual approaches to ideas of self, queerness, gender, dreams, and ritual encounters.

Special Performances to take place on the opening night.

Isn’t It Time You Came Home?
Chloë Laycock, Athanasia Papathanasiou, Lucinda Thomas and Tiffany Slowik
Exhibition: 15th – 18th March, Project Space
Opening Night: Tuesday 14th March, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

The artists will turn the gallery into a representation of a domestic space filled with ready-mades using their work as interruptions to domestic banality. They will work collaboratively to fill the space and perform within it: a TV screen will show an interrupted TV programme, textiles created collaboratively will adorn the furnishings, while the overall space will be lit as a set. You will experience a wide variety of media as they endeavor to explore their roles in the world through this exhibition.

Week Two
Nature and the Anthropocene
Madeleine Negus and Carla Lavin
Exhibition: 22nd – 25th March, Main Gallery
Opening Night: Tuesday 21st March, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Nature and the Anthropocene is a collaborative sculptural installation exploring the ideas of human interaction to the natural world around us. It will combine rudimentary media with technology based work as a reflection of this. The use of moving image alongside clay sculpture highlights the contrasting approaches of both the artists, whilst also attempting to illustrate the fusion between the two fundamental components of our modern day world and how they co-exist. The audience is able to view the haptic sculptures as material objects as well as experience the virtual interaction between the material and the artist within the moving image, creating a dual dimension of the contexts that are being explored.

Facade
Holly Shaw, Julia Shearer, Hannah Parikh, Maya Fitzherbert and Micky Dickson
Exhibition: 22nd – 25th March, Project Space
Opening Night: Tuesday 21st March, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Combining the dualities of a utopia and real life. An amalgamation of objects that allude to the real, conjuring up nostalgia, yet present a feeling of unfamiliarity. Be reminded of the past, be present in the present and be awoken to the future. Ambience. Relaxation. Disturbance. Realisation. Will you let yourself be interrupted in paradise?

The Opening Nights for each of the four exhibitions will take place in the Main Gallery and Project Space. As always, there will be donations bars with ales provided by local brewery, Springhead.

Artist Talks: Saturday 25th March at 2pm

Free Entry: All Are Welcome

Exhibition Opening Hours:
Opening Nights: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Tuesday to Friday:12.00pm to 6pm
Saturday:11:00am to 5:00pm
16, Southwell Road
Nottingham
NG1 1DL

Website: www.surfacegallery.org
Email: info@surfacegallery.org
facebook.com/surfacegallery
twitter.com/surfacegallery
instagram.com/surfacegallery/

Website

Booking Link