Thursday 29 April 2010

jacqueline leggatt - bangor, uk

artist jacqueline leggatt is on a mission to alter the perceptions of bangor...



I live in the beautiful City of Bangor, which is a very small City in North Wales; the magnet was incorporated in my ongoing art exhibition in an empty shop in the heart of the City.
Bangor has had some bad press recently, with the recession closing lots of shops on our high street, our City looked run down and uncared for.
Myself and fellow art students, Linda Jones and Nia Hughes, who are studying fine art at Coleg Menai, decided to try and brighten up an empty shop in the Deiniol Shopping Centre by installing a temporary art exhibition; 'Impressions of Bangor', with the work being based on the City, with the aim of making art that was accessable and enjoyable to look at.
I have also set up my own Facebook page 'Bangor IS Beautiful' and have a few hundred members who have the same positive attitude about Bangor as myself.
The image I am including is of the magnet placed on one of my hand-cut maps of the City of Bangor, which was placed in the window of our exhibition.

you can join her campaign by visiting the facebook site here

Monday 19 April 2010

stephanie foundos - philadelphia, usa

stephanie foundos writes... " I have had a lot of fun so far walking and taking pics for your project! This pic seems to be the best and I'd like to submit it to make this little girl happy as well. Her name is Brianna, she is my neighbor. The picture was taken in the Kennsington section of Philadelphia in front of her elementary school, which has an awesome tile mosaic of a double-headed dragon."

Saturday 10 April 2010

there is beauty on the bbc


our project, and its exhibition has cracked the establishment, and made it into the annals of the bbc

to see click on this link

Wednesday 7 April 2010

sue james - whanganui, new zealand

sue james has sent in these pictures from the furthest afield so far. whanganui lies some 11,523 miles from stoke-on-trent, on new zealand's north island.


The fishermen are along the river that runs through Whanganui


The park is called Kowhai Park, it's one of the last remaining parks of this kind in NZ, so big and bright.




Tuesday 6 April 2010

tony jones - stoke-on-trent, uk

stoke photographer tony jones has sent in this insight into denise o'sullvan's new studio in burslem.

Monday 5 April 2010

beauties of the month for march

i couldn't separate these two entries so siobhan tarr and julie brixey williams are sharing this month's spoils. both these images sum up perfectly what this project is all about.


there is beauty in exhibitions

there is beauty in the city has become a piece of urban beauty itself. set in the window exhibiting space of AirSpace gallery in stoke-on-trent, the exhibition consists of a block of analogue televisions in varying states of disrepair and visual quality, playing a slideshow of all the project's submitted images, 24 hours a day.

There is Beauty in the City is a collaborative project with the people of the world, which encourages a reframing and rethinking of the urban spaces that we inhabit using a magnet as a tool to renegotiate familiar territories.

This project allows people to take control of the world around them. 'There is beauty in the city' provides a reframing device, which means that people may negotiate the place they live in a new way and see their everyday world differently. The project may inspire change in people's lives, by encouraging them to be proactive rather than reactive or apathetic.

The project could easily be (mis)interpreted as an effort to simply collect and label images of urban spaces and indeed if the project was to be undertaken by just one person or one individual, this idea of ‘beauty’ could become very problematic.
The fact that many people’s views on ‘beauty’ are included in the project makes for a very interesting end result. Although ‘there is beauty in the city’ reads rather like a statement, the processes of photographing the phrase in situ and determining which areas to include, are quite inconclusive and questioning in nature. Additionally, the fact that many different people are working with this phrase on their own terms means that the idea of there being beauty in the city is open to a wide variety of interpretations, which makes it hard for ‘beauty in the city’ to become a fixed idea. It is important to see the phrase ‘there is beauty in the city’ as essentially a starting point or tool for interacting differently with ones’ environment
.

a big thanks to everyone who has taken part so far.

Is there a corner of your city that you want to flag up, draw attention to, or label as beautiful?

To join the project and get your hands on a magnet of your own, email: thereisbeautyinthecity@yahoo.co.uk


the exhibition





as a kid, i could never walk past a radio rentals or granada shop window, without stopping and looking in wide-eyed wonder at the mass of tv sets all generally showing one of the three available tv channels. i was seduced by the visual display, i dreamt that one day i could live in a place like this.

today, those shops are still in our cities. the shop names have changed, the channels have multiplied 100 fold, but they're doing the same thing -nudging at our aspirational materialist instincts and desire to be at the cutting edge of technological advance.

the other thing that has changed is the television itself. more than 80 years after john logie baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouettes and moving duotone images, in london's selfridges store, the era of the cathode ray television set is nearing its end. the analogue television and its system of 625 lines is set to become obsolete - forgotten and neglected as the world moves on to bigger, grander and newer ideas - digital, plasma, lcd and hd.

for the analogue tv, read human life - in a full life of, give or take, 80 years, we're born, we negotiate our uncertain early years, before blossoming into fully formed confident adulthood. then the decline as youthful modernity overtakes us, leaving us bewildered before being confined to the ranks of the neglected and forgotten. we die.

but we leave a legacy, in the shape of existence, history, experience and memory - invaluable in the shaping of the modern world and venerated as an indispensable component of what we become.


curated by glen stoker

Sunday 4 April 2010

sarah gee - sunderland, uk

spring officially announced in sunderland.
sarah gee writes..." There is beauty in this city - but you have to look for it"