'Strange days and some flowers' exhibition

Today Sarah visited Lancaster and we checked out some exhibitions.
The newly refirbished Storey Gallery had the exhibition 'Strange Days and Some Flowers'.

Around the installations and paintings, there was another installation by Graham Hudson, made from 'steel tubes and clip structure' aka scaffolding! It was pretty cool actually. As we walked around, the composition kept changing, with all the different squares and rectangles it reminded me of Piet Mondrians paintings. It also gave nice backgrounds for the other installations.


There were some really nice pictures by Dan Baldwin. I liked how bright and chaotic they were and the use of mixed media. This one was my favourite.
Dan Baldwin - Love in the garden, 2008.


Dan Baldwin - We End Up Meat, 2008. This had a knife stuck to it.


Dan Baldwin - We All Start With Pure Heart, 2008.


Dan Baldwin - Halloween, 2008. close up of it.


Don Brown - Yoko XVII, 2006. This looked like a sheet over a statue but the sheet shape was the statue, it was like a scary ghost! but cool.


Don Brown - Yoko XXI, 2008. This looked really nice white with shadows, and against the white background too.


Jock Mooney - Discontinued, 2009. This was another of my favourites in this exhibition, it was even cooler close up, with all the detail of all the figurines, so bright and random!


John Stark - The Apiary, 2008. This painting was beautiful close up, especially the clouds.


Laura Ford - Boystory 1, 2001. There were a few of these, they were a bit scary, this was my fave of them though.


Next we went to The Book Room, which is a little independant book shop with art on the walls. The current exhibition was "Manchester 89 - 92", by Richard Davis. "A collection of portraits taken in that city during the years between 1989 - 1992 & involves Musicians, Comedians, Poets & Writers. The following are all featured in this exhibition: Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Lemn Sissay, John Thomson, Caroline Aherne, Linda Smith, New Order, John Hegley, Frank Sidebottom, Jon Ronson, Dave Gorman, John Cooper Clarke."

It was hard to take photos in there because it was dark and also the photos had glass infront. They were mainly in black and white, but some were brightly coloured. This one came out ok:


The shop also had a really cool ceiling covered with book pages, it looked so cool:


I had a nice day and really enjoyed the 'Strange Days and Some Flowers' exhibition, there are some exhibitions i visit and think hmm yeah it was ok and there were some good bits but i really enjoyed this whole exhibition. Also it had a cool title. just like this blog entry does now :)

Nice M&S Cod packaging

I went to M&S to get some cod, when I opened the packet and took the fish out I was pleasently surprised by the packaging, on the back of the label on the bottom which shows through the clear packet behind the fish it had newspaper print design on it! So cute! Like in a real chip shop.. well a retro one now because they aren't allowed to use it anymore because of ink.
I thought it was a nice idea for fish packaging anyway.

RAW DEAL! Arnie film!

I was very excited yesterday to notice there was gonna be a Schwarzenegger film on that night which I hadn't seen - woo! I'm a fan of action films, Jean-Claude Van Damme is my fave, I have a big stack of his dvds, then my next fav is Arnie, I don't actually own any of his films though.

Anyway this film on last night was called "Raw Deal" from 1986 (HA! 80's ones are the funniest!). "It's the story of an FBI agent who wants to get revenge against a Mafia organization, and sends a former FBI agent (now small-town sherriff) played by Schwarzenegger to destroy the organization from the inside."


The poster is pretty cool, i like the
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
SCHWARZENEGGER
in the background fading towards the bottom.


It actually wasn't as good as i'd hoped..:( It did have cool 80's action movie music, and a few lame/awesome Arnie one liners (e.g Don't drink and bake) but it had the potential to be funnier. The fighting scenes were ok but there could have been more of them, there were quite a lot of guns, sometimes when there are gun fights i just start day dreaming, they usually bore me, i much prefer plain old fighting. I got a bit of a feeling of de ja vu because he wears a leather jacket and is quite unanimated like the Terminator..

My favourite scene was in the last half hour of the film, he went to some quarry and rode around in his car shooting loadsssssssa people, to the sound track of Rolling Stones - Satisfaction! HA! Pretty random and awesome. I found a clip of it, skip to about 0.45. Before that it's just him packing his guns and putting his jacket on, so ye if you wanna see his bulging muscles watch from the start:



Whilst writing this entry i'm half watching the 1988 film "My step mother is an alien" on ch5. the Alien has a hat like Guinan! Deffo must have been the fashion in space in the late 1980s.

NORTH EARTH! Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art - Edinburgh day trip

A few weeks ago(i've been too lazy to blog, i started this post weeks ago and didn't finish..til now) i went on a day trip to Edinburgh! I had never been to Scotland before, we got free tickets so that was pretty cool. I was excited at the fact that it was the most Northerly place i'd been on Earth, so i kept referring to it as North Earth, it's a pretty cool name, i think it will catch on. I felt higher up the Earth whilst there, amazing huh.

I was surprised when i got there at how it looked, it wasn't what i expected, i don't know what exactly i was expecting, maybe something along the lines of Scotland in the film Doomsday? haha! There was lots of nice decorative architecture and statues, it reminded me of somewhere like Germany/Switzerland etc although i haven't been to either of those. The castle was cool, it was on top of a big rocky hill, it looked very dramatic, like in films with evil whoever living in it and terrorizing the whole city.
I took quite a lot of photos of lots of random things, here are a few, and there are more on my flickr:



Whilst there i visited the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
When we walked into the gallery the first sculpture we were greeted with was MASSIVE, it was called 'Vulcan'!! but as in the Roman god of fire not as in the green blooded aliens..tsk. It was taller than 2 floors, it looked like a big tin man kinda thing.. but not, and definitely no sign of pointy ears haha.
You weren't allowed to take photos in there but i jotted down some pieces i found interesting, i've found images of them online:

Paolozzi - Vulcan, 1999:



Edith Rimmington - The Decoy, 1948: This seemed interesting, strange and delicate.


Magritte - La Representation, 1937: I thought this was really unusual and liked that the frame followed the image's shape.



F.E McWilliam - Kneeling Woman, 1947. I thought this was just cool and uncanny.



John Bellany - Lapdog, 1973: Again.. just a bit weird and interesting and i like the brush strokes.



Francesca Woodman - Untitled 1975 - 1980: I've seen some of her work before and liked it so it was interesting to see it in a gallery, i liked these pieced which she had given to her boyfriend and had notes on them.



Vija Celmins - Night Sky #19, 1998: This artist had very delicate woodcuts, and the ones of stars and space attracted me at first, they were very nice up close especially.



Vija Celmins - Ocean Surface Woodcut, 1992:



Damien Hirst - Away From The Flock, 1994: This was cool to look at close up, to see the tics in its fur and its fur sticking out as if floating in space.



I'm glad i visited the gallery but there have been lots more galleries/exhibitions i've enjoyed much more than this one.