It's not about the gallery

About

It’s Not About the Gallery brings together the work of ten MA Fine Art and MA Printmaking students at Cambridge School of Art. What might first appear to be an oblique creative manifesto, or a tongue-in-cheek statement of intent, designed to wrong-foot an audience, is instead an attempt to posit the notion that art doesn’t happen in a vacuum and cannot exist solely in the physical gallery space. 

Each of the artists here has a uniquely different creative, cultural and geographic background, and themes are varied. However, what unites them is a desire to respond to realms beyond the ‘white cube’, and to set up a discourse that transcends traditional curatorial practice. The references, connections, and crossovers fall into three key areas but are by no means exclusive.

Landscape, memory, and archive. Ecology, environmental change, and our relationship with technology. Progress, obsolescence, and loss. How we communicate with, or hack, digital technologies. The disjoint between what we see and what we remember, traces of absence, and echoes of the past. Archives that function as visual databases, are imagined or fictional, or act as an alternative to the traditional.

The artist, the gallery, and our relationships with the media. Exploring what it means to be creative, the public and private persona, self-censorship, social media and the rising power of cancel culture. The authentic creative voice, the tension between order and rebellion, the obliteration of the mark, and process as outcome. The blurred lines between the gallery and the public spaces that we all occupy.

The realm of language, communication, and performance. Hidden potential, personal growth, self-expression, the relationship between the vessel and the body. The inner self, the roles we adopt, and the characters of our ‘internal family’. The richness of social, cultural, and secret languages and symbols. Feminine power, and our relationships to ourselves and our peers.

So, what happens now? Beyond this show, beyond the gallery? What is certain is that this exhibition marks the stepping-off point for each artist to begin new journeys. A chance to explore new worlds within their practice, to respond to an ever-changing world, and to challenge perceptions of what defines the physical and contextual boundaries of their art and its audience. Hopefully this disparity, these references to worlds beyond the exhibition space, are what make the work more accessible and relatable.