The School of Media Summer Show opens with a Private View on Thursday 4 June and features courses including BA (Hons) Photography.
This rigorous course takes a non genre specific, critical approach to the study of photography. Students research and study photography theoretically as well as practically, which leads them to develop conceptually strong personal practice.
We take a look here at a diverse range of projects from the show and the students who created them.
© Becca Sidhu, 2015
Becca Sidhu’s ‘Anxious Desires’ hints at the sense of unease that underlies our appetite for and consumption of glossy digital imagery, increasingly taking the place of the real. Becca tells us:
“The juxtapositions of images within the work presents a dystopian world created by fragments. The images play with illusion and construction, drawing the viewer into undefined spaces with infinite depth, which almost instantly push you back to the surface of the photographic print.
© Becca Sidhu, 2015
“Physical set builds and textures sit alongside digitally conceived ones, emphasising the very idea of ‘surface’. A portrait of exteriors is built. Consequently a sense of absence is created. A world based solely on a seamless exterior becomes unsettling.
“‘Anxious Desires’ explores the tension between our desire of this seductive surface, and an instinctive suspicion of what could be beneath it. Is there in fact a void – an infinite emptiness veiled in reflective surfaces?”
© Jeff Lam and Chong Ng, 2015
Jeff Lam and Chong Ng’s project is a response to the way in which the prevalence of digital cameras has made photography more affordable and seemingly democratic than ever. Jeff and Chong explain:
“This project is an attempt to deconstruct and rethink photography through looking at apparatus, methodologies and the image-making process.
© Jeff Lam and Chong Ng, 2015
“Through staged performances which involve cameras, optical devices and installations, norms and presupposed ideas surrounding photography are taken to the extreme, until they start to fall apart.
“Obsolete technologies and everyday objects are reinvented, adapted and radicalised.”
© Joanna Coates, 2015
‘Liznojan’ by Joanne Coates is a project that seeks a new kind of experience with nature. Joanna states:
“‘Liznojan is a work where I invite the viewer to look at the landscape in a new way. To reflect upon histories both forgotten and unspoken. In some senses a contemporary gothic fiction. A passage through new and old.
© Joanna Coates, 2015
“The landscape allows for a navigation of contemporary issues. A reflection on history. A re-visitation for forgotten souls. Redemption of both mind and spirit.
“The project sets this course between the world we know, and a supernatural reimagining through the world of the unconscious.”
Summer Shows 2015: Show 1 – School of Media
Private View: Thursday 4 June, 6-9pm
Exhibition open: Friday 5 – Thursday 11 June
Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm, closed Sunday
Late night opening: Wednesday 10 June until 9pm