About

Co-Lab is a short season taking place every two years in QUAD Gallery that aims to highlight collaborative working. It is a five week-long showcase of solo exhibitions by two artists who usually employ traditional techniques such as painting, drawing or sculpture, but have taken their way of working into the digital realm of Virtual Reality (VR) or moving image. The artists featured are Anna Bunting-Branch and Dryden Goodwin.

In early 2018 the Co-Lab project Middle Bound involved a number of local artists who came together in QUAD to produce a photographic exhibition that described the Midlands as a unique place in the UK. For Co-Lab 2020 QUAD presents in Gallery One new VR artwork by Anna Bunting-Branch that was co-commissioned in collaboration with four UK-wide organisations: QUAD, FACT Liverpool, Wysing Arts Centre and The Mechatronic Library. In QUAD Gallery Two will be screened the newly commissioned film work Alongside by Dryden Goodwin, shown with an installation of his original drawings from the making of the film, that was co-commissioned by QUAD and Animate Projects as part of the WORK Project.

Anna Bunting-Branch: Warm Worlds and Otherwise

QUAD Gallery One, 29 February – 5 April 2020

Anna Bunting-Branch presents Warm Worlds And Otherwise, an exhibition featuring a newly commissioned digital work that relates to the artist’s interest in the encounters between feminist practice and science fiction, using painting, digital animation and Virtual Reality to explore ideas of worldbuilding, embodied perception and technologies of representation. Central to the project is META (2019), an experimental 360-degree VR animation transforming the artists’ hand-painted characters, props and backdrops into an immersive virtual story world. Also included is the new installation AU Sandbox (2020) which expands her imagined worlds, and an accompanying ambient sound piece by artist Aliyah Hussain that underscores the viewer’s experience in the Gallery space as well as in the virtual environment. Co-curated by Helen Starr and Peter Bonnell

Dryden Goodwin: Alongside

QUAD Gallery Two, 29 February – 5 April 2020

In QUAD Gallery Two Dryden Goodwin’s newly commissioned film Alongside is an inquiry into proximity and empathy, explored through the working life of a social care worker as he builds supportive relationships with three vulnerable clients with severe physical disabilities or autism. The film focuses on details and points of contact between the care worker and the young men, as he navigates and enables them to access the world beyond the daycare centre. Alongside reflects on the care worker’s profound responsibility and drive, as he finds ways to carefully decode his clients’ needs to understand their anxieties and motivations. This is mirrored in Goodwin’s process of close observation, deciphering and translating this most intimate and delicate of jobs into a sensory study, rendered through his camera lens, pencil drawings and layered soundtrack. For the exhibition, accompanying the 24-minute film will be the original drawings created by Goodwin during the making of the film. Co-curated by Gary Thomas and Peter Bonnell.

Season Launch: Friday 28 February 6:30pm – 8:30pm

Refreshments provided, speeches launching the exhibitions and meet the artists in QUAD Gallery.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/co-lab-exhibition-launch-tickets-89967839229

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