Take Courage
'COURAGE' was one of the most focused of all the exhibitions RAG has ever put on. It was curated by Brit Artist Nathan Bean and staged at St Matthew's, Tarring Road, Worthing on the 7th & 8th October 2005.
It concentrated on photography, digital art and installations. Among those exhibiting were Dan Thompson, Tracey Thompson, Nathan Bean, Steve Carroll, Michelle Dawson, Nikki Cheal and Ingrid Plum.
Nathan's video pieces had one of their best airings for a while with all his old favourites on display ready to shock or entertain. These included: 'Grated Heart' a repeated image of a woman grating a sheep's heart with a cheese grater.
Also on show was 'Apathy is Catching' which shows a Ken and Barbie doll covered in matches and then set alight. Shown at the Worthing Museum and Art Gallery in 2002, it made headlines in the local press.
Ingrid Plum's 'First Impressions' caused a lot of delight. She wrote haikus about all the artists exhibiting on first meeting them and tied them to strings attached to helium-filled balloons, from which also hung origami birds folded from a beautifully delicate tissue paper.
When the exhibition was closed on the Saturday, these balloons were released across Worthing. So if you live in Brighton and a poem landed in your garden on Sunday referring to 'Fellow Pill Popper' you'll know what it is.
Dan Thompson's installations, which were site specific and an interesting facet of the artist's wide range of work, made an interesting feature. The horizontals of his 'Seventeen', with strings stretched like a cats-cradle across two pillars in the church, worked well against the vertical's of Ingrid's 'First Impressions'.
Steve Carroll had his digital prints and other computer enhanced work on display, including another showing of the intriguing graphic novel 'Disembodied'.
But his most disturbing piece was a tape of his poetry playing constantly in the background. This was a selection of four poems including 'Oak Leaf' and 'Population Explosion', imported into TextEdit on his Mac, played through the inbuilt speech software then recorded onto a cassette via his seven year-olds Fisher Price Karaoke machine. (He now has the software to put it straight onto CD – but needs must).
The emotionless, robotic voice is in stark contrast to the usually empassioned performance people are used to from Steve, so the audience hear the poems again. As Nathan Bean described it "hypnotically irritating".
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