Rewind: Let’s Press Play Together
VENUE : Milsom Place BA1 1DN
27 May to 12 June - open 11am to 6pm daily
(6pm ‘til late on 27th May - 11am to 3pm on 12 June)
'Rewind: Let's Press Play Together' uses nostalgia, playfulness, and outdated technologies to explore connectivity. Looking at how individuals connect with themselves, one another, and society: how we engage with our individual and collective pasts, presents and potential futures.
What does a past recorded in outdated- even obsolete-technologies mean? Does it fragment the self- individually and collectively- from its own past, or at least representations of it? What lingers lost and forgotten in undeveloped photographs and unplayable home videos?
What is the effect-psychologically, sociologically, politically, and ecologically- of our consumption, engagement with and discarding of technologies?
Technological development has led to unprecedented levels of connectivity. Most of us are continuously connected to one another, the world, and online spaces, creating a global, multifaceted, multi-voiced, complex, competing, constant stream of now.
Social media offers a world of connectivity, but algorithms create disconnected echo chambers. Curated presentations of ‘perfect’ lives disconnect us from one another and our lived realities. Voices shout over one another on crowded platforms. Ironically, is our increased connectivity online disconnecting us from ourselves, one another, and the physical world around us?
Can playfulness and personal nostalgia help us navigate and connect in today’s super modern world?
In this world where technologies meant to bring us together often make us feel more disconnected. Is there still a place for outdated technologies? For playfulness and our own personal nostalgia? Can they be used for positive? Can they help us remember, play, and (re)connect?
Using an array of artistic mediums ‘Rewind: Let’s Press Play Together’ explores these themes and questions.
Headshot of Jenny Alderton - photo credit Tim Kavanagh
Curated by Jenny Alderton
Jenny Alderton is a cross-disciplinary Artist who often works with movement, words, sound and photography to create video and installation work. They often explore themes such as self and identity, (dis)connectivity and (dis)communication, as well as space and place.
Image © Tim Kavanagh
Upcoming performances:
Rewind : Contributing Artists
Amy Bullock
My name is Amy Bullock and I’m currently in my first year studying Creative Arts Practice in Bath Spa University. I’m loving living in Bath and all of the creative opportunities it has provided me so far. Hopefully over the next couple of years my work will be displayed in Bath regularly. Keep an eye out.
Instagram @amymadesomething
Annis Joslin
Annis is an artist and filmmaker with a collaborative approach making work through conversations and participatory encounters with others exploring lived experience in a playful and reflective process leading to creating lens-based digital artwork.
Annis has shown work in the UK and internationally with projects and commissions with organisations including People United, The Royal College of Physicians, The National Trust, Tate Exchange, The Women’s Library, and The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. She is lead artist at Project Artworks and artist/co-director of Corridor, and collaborates as Cole & Joslin.
Twitter @annisjoslin - Instagram @annisjoslin
Beth Archard
Beth is a self-described STUFF artist, dealing with obsolete objects, building multi-layered narratives through things, blended with a swirling craft-ripple. Beth’s work considers nostalgia, almost a preoccupation, sitting on the fence of the analogue and digital worlds. She selects materials to produce works that might insist on memories in the immediate or have the potential to in the future. Beth is curious about the value systems ascribed to objects and materials, and the potential held within our stuff; considering craft/art, high-art/low-art she hopes to push and pull apart these dichotomies and make personal connections to create a more inclusive art space and experience.
betharchard.com - Instagram @bethsprouts
Seo Hye Lee
Seo Hye is an artist working with sound, illustration, objects and accessibility to experiment with new forms of narrative, creating playful pieces that challenge the idea of listening. Drawing inspiration from her hearing loss experience, Seo Hye aims to show the difference between hearing and listening; regardless of your hearing skill, one can always listen in a variety of ways. Her work and workshops have been presented physically and virtually in Wysing Arts Centre, Hove Museum & Art Gallery, Grundy Art Gallery, School of Art Institute Chicago, Tate Exchange, LCC, Call and Response Gallery and Vital Capacities.
seohyelee.com - Instagram @seohyel
Holly Crawford
Peripatetic Holly Crawford, born in California and currently living in NYC, uses mixed media and multimedia to grabble with institutional critiques and power structures in nonprofit spaces international on the net and in print. Projects: Women’s Work and My Museum Studio; The Silence Drew Off, Laughing with Medusa; Alchemy of Art and the Gift; If I’m, who are you?...; Critical Conversations in a Limo; May I have your autograph?; Books: Attached to the Mouse and 7 Days, My Art Life. She is an artist, poet and art historian. Her Ph.D. Art History and Theory (University of Essex), BA & MA Economics, and MS Behavioral Science. She founded and runs AC Institute.
www.hollycrawford.xyz - www.art-poetry.info - www.acinstitute.org - www.acbooks.org
Jenny Alderton
Jenny is a cross-disciplinary artist who often works with movement, words, and photography to create videos and installation work.Their artistic practice often engages with concepts of the self and identity, (dis)connectivity and (dis)communication, as well as psychogeography, space, and place.Jenny draws inspiration from a variety of subjects from politics and inequality, through to nostalgia, coincidence, and the everyday.
www.eloquentscream.com - Instagram @eloquentscream - Twitter @eloquentscream - facebook.com/EloquentScream
Karen Thompson
Karen Thompson was born in the coastal town of South Shields in 1973. In 2004 she completed ceramics qualifications at Kensington & Chelsea College then graduated with a BA (Hons) Ceramics from Bath Spa University in 2008. Thompson’s ceramic work draws on both historic and contemporary influences and frequently explores social and political themes using subversion, satire and humour. Her work is held in private and public collections including The Crafts Council, The Arts Council, York Art Gallery, Scarborough Museums Trust, Bath Spa University and Crescent Arts. Thompson currently lives and works in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
Joseph Simons
josephsimons.co.uk - Instagram @josephsimons
Marina Belikova
Matt Dart
Matt Dart is an unsuccessful conceptual artist who is neither young nor emerging.
He is not represented by any galleries and is yet to receive an award for his work.
Maria Denise Hall (everyone calls me Denise)
“I am 64 years old and an amateur photographer living in Selby North Yorkshire been doing a bit of photography on and off for 40 years. I mainly take photographs of nature when I am out walking in my favourite places such as the East Coast at Ravenscar (the town that never was) or a place called Skipwith Common (attached). Unfortunately I still work full time so the majority of my time is taken up by that.
I am part of a small group of people who meet up once a week to talk about and have a go at photography - York Photography Network.
Not into taking selfies at all or posing for photographs so the Covid Characters during lockdown really took me totally out of my comfort zone but it kept me focused, challenged and amused during a difficult time.”
Instagram @delusarcovidcharacters
Matt Noir
Matt Noir is a Brighton based painter with a BA in Fine Art from Bath School of Art & Design. He has exhibited in England and is a regular contributor to the Brighton Artists Open Houses. In 2017 he held his first major solo exhibition at Gallery 40, Brighton.
With lockdown Matt continued to exhibit his work through virtual shows and online platforms, as well as being published in the Artist Talk Magazine. He also had his studio featured as part of The Friend of the Artist ‘The Studio Image Project’ which showed his creative environment.
Matt Noir’s paintings investigate the symbolic power of the object, how they are bestowed with meaning, evoke memory and develop narrative. He works with early-to-mid 20th century pieces, that have a technical function, but are also objects of beauty and elegance which can be imbued with personality and character.
Matt Noir works with devices of communication which have traversed from the once commonplace to a new iconographic status and uses these to explore themes of isolation and communication. He is interested in the connections that are derived through the viewer’s relationship to the objects. There may be a sense of nostalgia that these objects initially conjure up, but this is just the key to open the door to memories and meaning connected to the objects as well as the objects having their own signifiers. All of this strengthens the dialogue between the objects and the onlooker to create a ‘conversation’.
mattnoir.co.uk - Instagram @mattnoirartist
Milo Costelloe
"I have always considered myself an artist before anything else, despite most of my practice being based in photography I have never wanted to restrict myself to its medium or its principles; I am an artist that uses a camera, not a photographer.
Working in printmaking, experimental film, installation, collage or whatever seems appropriate, I approach my practice with an attitude of allowing my concepts both dictate and develop my choice of medium.
Exploring a range of ideas in my practice, my work tends to gravitate more towards focusing the merit to the thinking and concepts behind the art or the base of it entirely, with both figurative and abstract work. The subject of my practice often centres around space and place, with underlying political and social commentary, due to my internet In politics and culture.
My practice also often involves a theme of nostalgia both personal and cultural, Influenced from the 20th century, i seek to develop the processes, ideas, and aesthetics of the time, rec-ontextualising them into a modern world.”
Scirocco Dance Theatre Company
Scirocco Dance Theatre is an emergent company co-founded by choreographer Irene Fiordilino and sound designer Aidan Good.
Their practice sits between choreography and architecture: the intention is to creatively take inspiration from both disciplines in order to produce interdisciplinary artworks where the relation between bodies and space is brought into focus through the presence of performers and designed stage sets.
Their work has been supported by artistic residencies, featured in art magazines, and presented internationally.
sciroccodancetheatre.com - Instagram @scirocco_dancetheatre
Stefanie Reling-Burns
Stefanie Reling-Burns describes herself as a ‘mixed-media artist’. Since around 1998, digital media and the internet have become additional tools for the realisation of her artistic ideas - alongside the ‘classic work materials’.
Her working methods are characterised by surprising mind games with which she sends the viewer on unusual peculiar visual journeys. Her text works in particular, with their subliminal hints and emotions, can be experienced personally by each individual, without appearing bold.
As a colleague aptly put it, Stefanie Reling-Burns presents a “relaxed, breathing view of the banality of our existence in her works, and, in the long run, balances between joyful amazement and sharp insistence on the exclusiveness of this perspective, which sometimes gives an inkling of a serene anti-art attitude. She observes everyday life and reproduces ultra-affirmatively to depict, but she does not provoke violently, she has forgiven the phenomena and also peels the lovable out of the nerve-racking occurrences. At times she involves herself empathically and navigates as a peaceful troll figure through soft mountains of junk.” (Peter Haury)
Sophie Hill
Sophie C Hill is a contemporary fine artist working within an expanded painting practise. This means she likes drawing and painting and does lots of different stuff with this.
Her practise is playful, experimental, expressive and relies on personal lived experience to explore wider issues.
She really wants her art to connect with other people and create a shared space for ideas, feelings and experiences.
Tim Southall
Tim Southall, an emerging Bristol based mixed media artist, enjoys working on collaborative, community and public art opportunities. His artworks reflect his life as a Quaker, his career developing affordable homes and his wish to engage the viewer through his maquettes and sculptures and to observe the aesthetic and sustainable qualities of cardboard and other found materials.
During April 2022 he has submitted an artwork each day to 12ocollective challenge thirty.works/artist/0455
In January 2022 he made a maquette of Open to New Light and reached the semi-finals for a public installation at the Lucca Biennale Cartasia 2022.
uring August 2021 he worked with Art under the Flyover on a community mosaic made from reclaimed timber.
In May 2021 in collaboration with David Alesworth he made a flat pack interlocking cardboard sculpture Magpie shown at the Flight exhibition at the Koel Gallery in Karachi in May 2021 koelgallery.com/exhibitions/flight
He installed a similar interlocking free-standing sculpture Freedom at the Bristol School of Art degree show in June 2021. In March 2021 he created Integrity carved from 100 double wall corrugated boards initially shown outside the Horfield Quaker Meeting House before being relocated outside the Royal Western Academy and Bristol School of Art.
His earlier work includes: Globe repurposed from the translucent strips of an earlier sculpture Disequilibrium. He created Less than half a chance, a stop motion video for an online exhibition showing different aspects of a carved cardboard sculpture, Dispose of Responsibly an ovoid sculpture laser cut from double wall corrugated board and Truth Peace and Simplicity, a parabola created from rings of sawn millboard.
timsouthall.com/pagecv - Instagram @tim.p.southall - facebook.com/tim.southall.56