To Firstsite! …on Wednesday afternoon to have something of a shifty at a couple of new exhibitions that have recently opened.
First off we have Polly Braden and Against the Tide.
This is a small but very compact photographic exhibition, along with some multimedia, which explores themes of what does it mean to grow up by the seaside?
Polly’s background is in Jaywick. She describes having a love hate relationship with the local area. If you watched nothing but those crappy Channel 5 docs about Jaywick, then one half of this equation might push through stronger.
But wait! What’s this?
Those shitty programmes never really get behind what’s really happening in coastal towns. They’re just chasing the next Daily Mail headline.
The exhibition shares the stories of young people living in coastal towns across England. The photography borrows a lot from Martin Parr, but it’s never intrusive or even taking the piss.
We spent most of the time watching a really informative film, which put together a short story from the House of Wingz dance studio in Blackpool. This was all about young kids in the area learning street dance and seeing where it can take them.
There were some pretty powerful social messages as well. Many of those speaking in front of the camera focused heavily on housing. The connection was made between poor housing and the lack of life opportunities, especially in coastal areas.
The adjacent gallery space at Firstsite was handed over to Simon Carter and his exhibition From the Landscape. The blurb explains how Simon has walked and sketched out the North Essex landscape around his home near Frinton for over forty years.
What’s on show here at Firstsite is a physical landscape being created within a sterile art environment. You need to really walk around and experience it to get the full effect.
I would hesitate to call it immersive, but you do feel that you’re actually walking around a location, rather, within a gallery.
Each gallery space changes colours to reflect the changing light. A nice touch was a soundscape of coastal sounds, such as birds.
The space within Firstsite is used superbly. There are a few false walls in there, giving the effect that you are exploring a kid’s den.
It was also great to see a half decent use of the infamous Firstsite sloping wall. There was a large landscape minimalist painting stretching all the way around the gallery, showing a coastal scene.
The dead swan buried in the floor at Firstsite was a bit of a downer.
A decent afternoon at Firstsite. It’ll be interesting to see how the gallery benefits with the more rock ‘n’ roll Banksy exhibition next door at The Minories. I suspect they’ll both supplement each other and go hand in hand.
