Kirkby Gallery: Quentin Blake Larger than Life

29 October 2012 – 12 January

viewing: 1 November

We are delighted to present the exhibition, ‘Larger than Life’, which is a new body of work by world-renowned illustrator Quentin Blake. Blake is best known, both in England and internationally, as an illustrator of children’s books, however over the past ten years his pictures have increasingly escaped from the pages of books. Blake has produced designs for fabrics, wallpaper, ceramics, lampshades and greetings cards but also, as large as life and sometimes even larger, works for the walls of museums and hospitals and other public spaces. For the first time, the exhibition will feature his illustrations for these public spaces including: the reception area of a children’s hospital in London; residential wards and bedrooms of elderly mental health patients; a hospital for eating disorder patients and most recently – a series devoted to mothers and babies swimming together under water for a new maternity unit in Angers, France. Patients and doctors vouch for their therapeutic effect: visitors to the exhibition will be able to experience it for themselves. The exhibition will also include a specially commissioned Reading and Family Room complete with lots to see and do in this area for families. Kirkby Gallery is only one of four galleries that Larger than Life is touring to, the other venues are Compton Verney in Warwickshire, The Foundling Museum in Paisley and Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. Location: Kirkby Library / Gallery, Newtown Gardens, Kirkby, Knowsley, L32 8RROpening times: Monday & Friday: 9.15am – 5pm, Tuesday & Thursday: 9.15am – 7pm, Wednesday: 9.15am – 1pm, Saturday: 10am – 1pm.

Kirkby Gallery: Images 35 Best of British Illustration 2011

13 August – 13 October

‘Images 35’ is a showcase of work by the UK’s most talented illustrators, including new work from the big names in the industry. ‘Images’ is the premier and longest running jury-selected illustration annual and touring exhibition in the UK. It provides the leading showcase for the variety of contemporary illustration commissioned in the UK today. Launched in 1976, AOI has organised Images for the 35th time, marking a long history of promoting the best of contemporary British illustration. On display is a selection of 90 artworks showcasing the talents of illustrators who have made a significant contribution to their industry over the last year. The exhibited work provides an overview of the illustrations that were selected by an expert panel of internationally acclaimed judges. This years panel includes Sam Freeman (Art Director of Design Week), Martin Harrison (The Times) and Geoffrey Pais (BBC Learning). The AOI was established in 1973 to promote contemporary illustration, advance and protect illustrators rights and encourage professional standards. It has successfully increased the standing of illustration as a profession and improved commercial and ethical conditions of employment. To coincide with the summer holidays and the ‘Big Draw’ in October, there will be a range of art workshops to accompany this exhibition. Location: Kirkby Library / Gallery, Newtown Gardens, Kirkby, Knowsley, L32 8RROpening times: Monday & Friday: 9.15am – 5pm, Tuesday & Thursday: 9.15am – 7pm, Wednesday: 9.15am – 1pm, Saturday: 10am – 1pm.

Lucy is a recent Fashion Fabrics and Accessories graduate fromDe Montfort University and has been involved in numerous projects, includingrecently exhibiting in the prestigious Premiere Vision Indigo Exposition inParis.

 Creative, fresh and focused, Lucy is currently working as afreelance designer and artist with a flair for innovative colour and trend-leddesigns.   The collection exhibited here is Lucy’s Degree show work.  ‘Roaring Twenties’ was inspired by various influences including the1920’s, flapper girls, art deco, and the film ‘Cabaret’. Lucyspecialised in screen and digital printing on heavy and lightweight fabrics inorder to create a layering of depth. Her use of devoré (a chemical burningprocess) was introduced to create a luxurious and lavish feel to the work.

 In March of this year, Lucy was commissioned by De Montfort tocreate a shawl to be presented as a gift to The Queen on her recent visit tothe University, a replica of which will also be on display at the gallery.

 For further information on any of the above please contactKnowsley Leisure & Culture Service

0151 430 7787 or 0151 443 5617 http://www.knowsley.gov.uk/things-to-see-and-do/exhibitions.aspx

Venue: StART Space Gallery, Kirkby Gallery / Library, NewtownGardens, Kirkby, Knowsley, L32 8RR

20 – 21  July

Vewing:  20 Jult 19 -21:30

2012 marks my 10th year as a professional photographer and to celebrate the occasion I have decided to hold an exhibition of my work. Showcasing some of my personal unseen catalog and would like to extend an open invitation.

The exhibition will be HELD OVER TWO DAYS at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool with a private viewing on Friday 20th July from 7-9:30pm and will be open to the public on the following day Saturday 21st from 10-4:00pm.

If you would like to register for the private viewing please email me below or register on the facebook event page places are limited. Tickets for the Private Viewing are £10 with all proceeds being donated to Macmillan Cancer Charity. I will be giving a talk about the work and my career in the industry and their will be a glass or two of wine or beer to numb the pain of the talk, which I trust will not be too boring.

Rory Lewis, has spent the last decade honing his craft as a self taught commercial, fashion, portraiture and editorial photographer. This is his first exhibition of a cross section of his body or work in the home town of Liverpool and represents his first ten years of his life through the lens.

Old Christ Church:The Waterloo Art Exhibition

21 – 29 July

Viewing: 20 July 19:00

An exhibition in it’s sixth year with over 400 works on display from
fuiiartists throughout Merseyside, Lancashire and beyond.
Open with free entry on Saturdays and Sundays ony between 10.30am and
4.40pm.

© Cyril Ruoso (France) Tiny warm-up

One of the world’s most prestigious photography exhibitions, Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year, will come to World Museum in Liverpool.

From 6 July to 28 October 2012 one hundred astonishing, creative and humorous wildlife photographs will go on display that celebrate the drama and splendour of the natural world.

Among the photographs on display will be the prizewinning entries to the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition 2011. The overall winner was Daniel Beltrá from Spain for his work Still life in oil, a striking image of eight brown pelicans rescued from an oil spill. Young Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner was Mateusz Piesiak from Poland with his work Pester power a picture that depicts two American oystercatchers on a beach on Long Island, New York.

These prizewinning images come from the tens of thousands of international entries from the competition’s 17 categories. The images will be beautifully displayed in sleek backlit installations that present a huge variety of stunning and inspiring photographs capturing nature’s rich diversity. The exhibition debuted at the Natural History Museum before it embarked on its tour around the world. The exhibition will be free to enter and the first time that the backlit images will be seen in the UK outside London.

A selection of mounted specimens from World Museum’s wildlife collection will also be going on display. To tie in with the London 2012 Olympic Games each specimen will be a ‘record breaker’, from the Wandering Albatross who has the greatest wingspan to the Spotted Hyena, a mammal with the most powerful jaws in the animal kingdom.

Steve Judd, Director of World Museum said: “We’re delighted to be showing this fabulous exhibition. From the sea to the stars, World Museum celebrates wildlife and the natural world so this exhibition fits perfectly with what we already offer to our visitors. It also gives us an opportunity to display some of our own collection which will compliment the photography.”

The first Wildlife Photography Competition was held in 1964, with three categories and around 600 entries, now there have been more than 40,000 entries received from more than 90 countries around the globe.

Now in its 47th year, the competition is owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine and is sponsored by Veolia Environnement. It is internationally recognised for taking a lead in the artistic representation of the natural world and continues to be held in high esteem.

For more information about the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition and World Museum go to – www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wildlife

Meurtrière (Dolomites), 2009 © Nicolas Milhé. Courtesy of Galerie Samy Abraham.

Open Eye Gallery is excited to present Still Outside (or Unexplained), a group show
looking at how we imagine and interact with our surroundings.

Still Outside (or Unexplained) presents four artists, from the UK, France and
Switzerland. They share common ground, closely observing and reworking parts of their
environments that might otherwise be unseen or neglected. Using still and moving images,
they question what we see as natural and artificial, and what we think we know about the
world around us.

Pietro Mattioli’s (b. Switzerland) series Two Thousand Light Years from Home reveals a
hidden landscape in the artist’s immediate surroundings. Mattioli took these pictures at
night, as his child slept, over three seasons in 2006-7, never straying beyond the reach of
his baby monitor’s signal. Pools of light from his camera’s flash isolate and transform an
array of familiar objects. The project documents Mattioli’s nocturnal wanderings and
creates a catalogue of hidden beauty in the everyday.

Nicolas Milhé’s (b. France) work explores power, surveillance and the seductiveness of
images. Open Eye presents a 3 metre-long sculpture emblazoned with a gigantic image of
a tranquil Alpine landscape. Penetrated by a vertical arrow-slit aperture, it transforms the
gallery into a territory under surveillance and a place of potential violence. Here, Milhé
points to a sinister terrain behind the idealised image of the northern European landscape.
For him the image is a mask that conceals the harsher realities of contemporary politics.

In her video work Uncomfortable Silence i (2012), Rebecca Lennon (b. UK) meticulously
spray-paints white a series of objects selected from the detritus of a city street. The
gesture recalls the marks that mysteriously appear on roads before works begin, or the
white lines that mark the location of a corpse at a murder scene. Executed according to its
own enigmatic, ritualistic logic, each action reclaims and transforms its object. Rebecca
Lennon also presents a large-scale sound installation, This is what they built the ship with
(2011), in the high-tech, glazed concourse adjacent to the gallery. In what the artist
describes as a “call from the wild, in reverse”, the calls of seagulls, sampled from YouTube
and auto-tuned to assume an eerie perfection, will burst intermittently into the space.

Alison Stolwood (b. UK) takes a critical look at the idea of nature as something apart,
pure and picturesque. Her photographs highlight the ways in which time and perception
act on the landscape. They hint darkly at something that is both a product of our
interference with the environment, and elements of it that are beyond our control.

Stolwood writes: “I like to isolate a small part of our infinitely complex surroundings, in
order to think about the impossibility of understanding the whole. I use the lens as an aid
to observation and as a tool for manipulation, power and control.”

Open Eye was founded in 1977 in the former Grapes Hotel in central Liverpool. As well as
one of the UK’s first photography galleries, it housed darkrooms, film and video production
facilities and recording studios, which played a major part in Liverpool’s vibrant 1980s
music scene. The title for this exhibition, Still Outside (or Unexplained), is borrowed from
the B-side of a 7″ single by the new wave band Systems, published by Open Eye Records
in 1981.

ARCHIVE EXHIBITION
ERWIN WURM: ONE MINUTE SCULPTURES

Cult artist Erwin Wurm (b. Austria), whose followers include Flea from the US band the
Red Hot Chili Peppers, uses photography and film to capture transient sculptural works.
Since the late 1990s Wurm has been developing One Minute Sculptures, an ongoing
series in which we see the artist or his models pose in spontaneous ways with everyday
items, inserting pencils in ears, propping chairs on eyes, and bringing a host of inanimate
objects to life. Open Eye Gallery is proud to present a selection of eighteen photographs of
Wurm’s earliest One Minute Sculptures, made in the late 1990s.

“The fundamental steps consisted in abandoning the idea of durability and infinity.
Sculpture could also last for just a few minutes, a few seconds. The works were
transported to the level of the immediate present.” Erwin Wurm

Presented with both a good dose of humour and an underlying cynicism, One Minute
Sculptures question the definition of sculpture, and wider issues about our consumer-
focused society.

31 May – 4 June 2012

Camp and Furnace

The Liverpool Art Fair is an exciting new open submission selling event over five days, designed to connect local artists with new art buyers on a large scale, break down barriers, and make affordable art accessible to all.

Showcasing a wide range of affordable original art by selected local artists, both established and up and coming, the fair will include a section of specially created work under £100, and a maximum price level of £1,000. The Liverpool Art Fair will provide a unique insight into the region’s creative talent; whether seasoned collector or first time art buyer, the fair will give everyone the opportunity to own their own piece of the Liverpool art world.

It will take place across two large exhibition spaces in the newly rejuvenated Camp and Furnace (previously the A-Foundation) in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle; launching on the evening of Thursday 31st May, and open to the public from 11am-6pm from Friday 1st – Monday 4th June

Liverpool’s creative talent is to be showcased during May and June with a visual arts festival that will include exhibitions, performances, an auction and the very first Liverpool Art Fair.

The Fair aims to give a unique insight into the region’s creative talent and will include 150 pieces of art by 73 artists in both 2D and 3D, selected from hundreds of artists throughout Merseyside and beyond by a panel of judges.

The Liverpool Art Fair is an open submission selling event over five days, launching on the evening of Thursday May 31st, and open to the public from 11am-6pm from Friday, June 1st to Monday June 4th. (Jubilee Bank Holiday Weekend).

It aims to connect local artists with new art buyers on a large scale, break down barriers, and make affordable art accessible to all by having a section of specially created work costing under £100, and a maximum price level of £1,000.

It will take place across two large exhibition spaces in the newly rejuvenated Camp and Furnace (previously the A-Foundation) in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle.

The Liverpool Art Fair is part of Liverpool Art Month that includes many of the city’s leading arts organisations including METAL at Edge Hill Station, Dot–Art; Arena Studios and Gallery, Bluecoat Studio Artists, Breeze studio Liverpool, The Bridewell Studios, The Gallery Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, the Liverpool POST, Red Wire, The Royal Standard and Wolstenholme Creative Space.

The Liverpool Art Fair is organised by Liverpool art gallery and consultants dot-art, who are based in Liverpool city centre, and specialise in affordable, high quality, locally sourced art, on a sale, commission and rental basis, as well as offering a range of complementary services including; art consultancy, exhibition planning and implementation, bespoke framing, art valuation and restoration and artist sourcing.

For further information please contact

Lucy Byrne, (dot-art) 0845 0176660 or email info@liverpoolartfair.com

Mike Rickett, 07710057372 or email mikerickett007@yahoo.co.uk

AND SEE: www.liverpoolartfair.com

Castlefield Gallery: Fundraising Auction -Put Your Money Where Your Eyes Are

30 May

Internationally acclaimed artists donate valuableworks for art auction to help Castlefield Gallery.

Castlefield Gallery (CG) will hold an extraordinaryFundraising Auction on 30 May 2012 – marking the mid-stage of its plannedincome generation and future re-launch plans.

The money raised will help to secure theorganisation’s future as a leader in artist development in the North West ofEngland.

The gallery has already received a large numberof spectacular drawings, sculptures, photographs and paintings from nationallyand internationally acclaimed past exhibitors such as Pavel Büchler, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Lubaina HimidMBE, Mark Leckey (Turner Prize 2008 winner), Leo Fitzmaurice (Northern ArtPrize 2011 winner), Haroon Mirza (Silver Lion, Venice Biennale 2011), OliviaPlender (British Art Show and Tate Triennial), Peter Saville and Liam Spencer. Every artist is donating 100% ofthe auction sales proceeds to CG.

CG can also announce that the auctioneer for the eveningwill be highly respected artist and teacher Professor Pavel Büchler ofManchester Metropolitan University.

The Gallery is now calling on art lovers andcollectors to support it in raising funds that will ensure CG’s continualsuccess in providing exhibiting and professional development opportunities forartists.

Since its formation by artists in 1984, arts charity Castlefield Galleryhas been at the forefront of developing emerging contemporary artists, and avenue for audiences to see new art. It runs an exhibitions programme that hasincluded subsequent Turner Prize winners and national and international exhibitors,e.g. in the British Art Shows, Tate Triennials and the Venice Biennale. It hasalso mentored artists who have gone on to win major commissions, e.g.Manchester collective Owl Project who has just launched their Cultural OlympiadArtists Taking the Lead project in the North East.

In the past, the gallery received revenue funding from Arts CouncilEngland (ACE), and also, thanks to ACE, owns its city centre venue. During thisperiod of public spending cuts, especially for perceived non front lineprojects such as artist development, CG has been busy reshaping its businessmodel so that it can raise enough income from a diversity of sources tocontinue its small but significant organisation for the next generations ofartists and audiences. Its new income generation plans have already brought inmajor successes in the form of project funding from ACE for the next 2 years,and research funding from Manchester Metropolitan University. This one-offauction is crucial to CG’s survival while other streams of earned income aredeveloped over the next 12 months.

Donatingartists to date:

David Alker, t s Beall, Alan Birch, Andrew Bracey,Pavel Büchler, Gordon Cheung, Elaine Constantine, Ben Cove, Gordon Dalton, ShezadDawood, Jane Chavez-Dawson, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Tracey Eastham, Chris Evans,Leo Fitzmaurice, Mary Griffiths, David Gledhill, Rachel Goodyear, S Mark Gubb, TomHackney, David Hancock, Sarah Hardacre, Lubaina Himid MBE, James Ireland,Hilary Jack, Samson Kambalu, Naomi Kashiwagi,Mark Leckey, David Mackintosh, SusieMacMurray, Jim Medway, Haroon Mirza, Fionna Murray, Tim Noble & SueWebster, Hans Ulrich Obrist, David Osbaldeston, Olivia Plender, Magnus Quaife, Arthur Roberts, KimRugg, Emma Rushton & Derek Tyman, Peter Saville, Dallas Seitz, Mit Senoj, Richard Shields,Rebecca Sitar, Liam Spencer, Roger Stephenson OBE and Jason Thompson

Date:                                                Wed 30 May 2012, 6-9pm

Viewing:                                           Sat19 May to Wed 30 May by appointment

Online auction launches:                 Fri 4 May

Venue:                                             CastlefieldGallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB

Telephone:                                      0161 832 8034

Website:                                         www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk

Admission fee:                                £10(deducted from price paid for purchased artwork)

                                                       The gallery is fully accessible.

St.Helens Central Library: Future Shorts Film Night at the Library

Saturday 19 May 2012

19.30 – 21.00

St.Helens Central Library

To celebrate the annual Museums at Night 2012, Central Library in
St.Helens Town Centre will open its doors after hours to welcome
visitors to a unique experience.
Future Shorts is one of the leading and most innovative short film
labels and since 2003, has created a rapidly expanding network that
allows filmmakers the opportunity to have their work seen on the
largest theatrical platform worldwide.
Central Library will be hosting a special Future Shorts screening with
a specially selected programme of short films being screened. Each of
the eight, ten minute films look at alternative aspects of love,
marriage and relationships – although each depicts and conveys
different aspects using different styles. The Spring Season programme
highlights includes Nash Edgerton’s Cannes and Sundance hit Bear, the
follow-up to his sensational Spider; Sam Taylor-Wood’s BAFTA nominated
Love You More, the latest short form work from Spike Jonze and Cannes
winner The Man Without a Head.
So come along, and enjoy some inspirational short films in a unique
setting. Free Refreshments will be provided.
Tickets are required and cost £2.00, these can be obtained from
St.Helens Libraries or by calling 01744 677446. ***For a limited time,
tickets are Buy One Get One Free! Offer ends Friday 11th May***

Only open to those aged 16 and over.
For more information, please visit www.futureshorts.com