Stories in the Dark and Magic Lanterns: Beaney Exhibition features work by Adam Chodzko

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Photo by Adam Chodzko.

 

Whitstable artist and School of Music and Fine Art Lecturer, Adam Chodzko, has stunning work featured in the exhibition Stories in the Dark, curated by artist Ben Judd. The exhibition is a co-commission by The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge and Whitstable Biennale, a festival of contemporary art.  (The exhibition is also part of the programme of the University of Kent’s International Festival of Projections, which ran 18 to 20 March 2016.)

Using rare, original magic lantern machines, projection devices invented in the 17th century that used the light of candles and oil lamps to produce shows that projected moving images for the very first time, and beautiful Victorian slides, this unique exhibition by artists Ben Judd, Jordan Baseman, Benedict Drew, Louisa Fairclough, Dryden Goodwin, Haroon Mirza, Lindsay Seers and Guy Sherwin, creates new work especially for The Beaney.

Mask Filter Arc and sea sponge in case

Adam Chodzko stuns us with images of dust ‘explosions’ in his work Ask The Dust, whilst his second work Mask Filter Arc he then combines the Beaney’s Venus Flower Basket with two magic lantern slides, creating a lantern whose intense flashes of light remind us of the process of inspiration and expiration, ugliness and beauty.

Says Adam about Ask the Dust: “A slide projector back-projects ‘images’ of dust ‘explosions’ onto a blind in the Explorers and Collectors gallery,sharing this ‘screen’ with moving patches of sunlight, channelled by a large arched window. The dust silhouettes are formed by tiny particles of debris, decay collected from the barrel of a cannon (captured from the Chinese during the Second Opium War, 1860) stored in the Beaney’s archives. Their apparently random arrangements, suspended in 35mm film slide mounts, now magnified, offer the possibility of being decoded and read, like tea leaves, as premonitions. Or perhaps as the animated frames from a recording of Chinese shadow puppet performance.”

The exhibition runs until Sunday 19 June.

Location: Special Exhibitions Room, The Beaney, 18 High Street, Canterbury, CT1 2BD

More info here: http://canterburymuseums.co.uk/events/stories-in-the-dark/