Unleash your imagination

In October and November last year OVADA (Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency) turned its post-industrial floor and wall space over to its first Oxford Open Exhibition, showcasing contemporary artwork by artists connected to Oxfordshire, all at different stages of their career.

The eclectic range of exhibits spanned painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, demonstrating the breadth and wealth of local artistic talent.

Of the 16 artists shortlisted to exhibit in the open, two were selected as the winners of the OVADA Oxford Open Professional Development Award – JD Haigh and Jon Lockhart. Since January 2014 Haigh and Lockhart have received specialist mentoring and tutorials in preparation for their exhibition, Shapes, Structures, Sounds: Chimerical Waypoint(s), which continues at OVADA until Sunday.

Not having worked together before, Haigh and Lockhart discovered, during initial meetings about how they might shape their summer exhibition at OVADA, a mutual desire to make the show truly collaborative. Lucy Phillips of OVADA said: “Both artists felt that the presence of the OVADA warehouse should be utilised as a platform, not just for their own artistic disciplines, but also for the work of others through further collaborations, which resonated with their ideas for this exhibition.”

The artists describe the exhibition as an invitation to be absorbed into the illusionary nature of shapes, structures and sounds as they are re-framed to become mythological readings of the familiar.

With an enormous blast from the very recent past, visitors to the exhibition are greeted with Chimera by Haigh, an enormous, ghostly grey digital projection of seagulls silently circulating around enormous cooling towers reminiscent of the recently demolished Didcot Power Station. The birds swirl to a mesmeric soundscape emitted from, but not out of a static piano. It transpires that over the past few months Haigh has been working with a group of local ambient art musicians, PADDOX, creating imagery that could be juxtaposed with their music.

As one enters the exhibition and explores the space it becomes clear that Haigh draws inspiration by her immediate surroundings – never before have I seen work exhibited in such an exciting and inventive way at OVADA.

Transposing architecture on architecture Haigh takes the viewer on a journey through space, negotiating and casting new perspectives on the building itself and on Lockhart’s work, in turn focusing the eye and unleashing the imagination.

Haigh uses images of buildings that are at once locally recognisable and generic to their type; these images resonate with echoes of loaded historical significance, and remind me of the debate surrounding the redevelopment of the close-by registry office where memories have been made.

So what of this apparently playful, large, labyrinthine audio visual kinetic installation that occupies much of OVADA’s vast chasm? The exhibition guide quotes an excerpt from The Accidental Artist by Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley that goes some way towards deciphering this tangled web of wonderment: “If you came across Jon Lockhart’s work without any prior knowledge, you might be baffled by the array of media, installation, film, sound, sculpture and collage, and by the use of countless and seemingly heterogeneous objects and materials.

This landscape of things and ideas would appear to you in the manner of a landslide, a vast mountain of stuff, with things half-buried and poking out at all angles. On closer examination, however, this accretion begins to read as an invitation for the viewer to sift and intervene. As we pick over the wreckage to uncover shreds of popular culture, shards of the everyday, snags of texts, things become tainted with familiar and often wondrous patterns. Participation, as opposed to spectatorship, is, after all, a dirty business, one that is best undertaken with rolled-up sleeves and a good sense of humour.”

The Boundless Museum is a meticulously crafted, mesmeric, site-specific installation. To view this installation is to precariously navigate a sweet-shop-esque obstacle course of nostalgic paraphernalia with its striking, chrome framework.

Made up of rails from a shop fit-out the framework is reminiscent of a scientific model of molecules; the rails appear to pull all of the important elements of the installation together, making sense of what would otherwise be a cacophony of sound and structure.

Taking the viewer on a physical and psychological journey, this is a really interesting exhibition that can be enjoyed on so many levels.

So roll up your sleeves, and catch Shapes, Structures, Sounds: Chimerical Waypoint(s) before it closes on Sunday.

CHECK IT OUT
Shapes, Structures, Sounds: Chimerical Waypoint(s) continues until Sunday at OVADA, 14A Osney Lane, Oxford 
ovada.org.uk 

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