An exhibition exploring the nostalgia of youth and teen angst – a time when anything is possible and everything is ahead of you – will open in Plymouth this month.
Many & Beautiful Things is concerned with that time in youth when anything is possible and life is a rush for new experiences. There may be inner anguishes, but there’s still an abandon, a thirst: before it inevitably leaves, usually gradually, sometimes suddenly.
This exhibition is a nostalgia for more innocent times, about when those times change, and the mind-set that it never will.
The show will be touring to The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, with two additional elements for the Plymouth event; the inclusion of Plymouth based artist Beth Emily Richards, and a collaboration between Antler Press and students at Plymouth College of Art.
For this exhibition, artist Beth Emily Richards turns her attention to an icon of hyper-masculinity, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Richards’ installation plays with replicating the pop culture icon in a repeating wallpaper pattern using traditional printing equipment at Plymouth College of Art. The work explores fannish desire, 90s nostalgia, and pre-teen bedrooms as celebrity-shrine.
In response to the ‘coming-of-age’ theme of the exhibition, BA (Hons) Photography students from Plymouth College of Art have had the opportunity to work with independent publisher Antler Press to produce work that offers an insight into their generation. Fragments of Youth considers the photographers’ own lives, and those of their peers as the subject matter, asking ‘what is it like to be young?’
Other works on show will include Paris-based artist Binelde Hyrcan’s video work Cambeck, which shows four young boys on an Angolan beach who strive for the ‘good life’, mimicking adult concepts of wealth and success with a playful, swaggering confidence.
Naomi Frears’ photography exposes her confessions of incidents and thoughts that mortified her with shame and embarrassment as a teenager, but as time passes, have faded to mild amusement.
London-based Melanie Manchot filmed her daughter with Super 8 film for a minute each month from the age of 11 to 18 years. 11/18 is presented on nine monitors, exploring the silent and gradual change in her appearance, and her ways of relating to the camera, to her mother, and to the world.
Santiago Mostyn’s All Most Heaven documents a time when he fell in with a group in the New York underground scene, where they developed an idea to build rafts and navigate their way down the Mississippi. The documentation of these trips through film, photography and journal entries, is an intimate and intense celebration of such nomadic relationships.
When: 5th July – 31st August 2019
Where: The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Tavistock Place, Plymouth PL4 8AT
£: Free
More info: www.plymouthart.ac.uk