Photography and painting in a Newcastle study visit

We’ve got a study visit packed with excitement for OCA Visual Arts students (painters, photographers, any visual art student welcome) on Saturday 12th January 2013. We will be visiting FUTURELAND NOW at the Laing Art Gallery, may look in at the John Martin images there too, before heading for the Baltic to see Jim Shaw.

FUTURELAND NOW is an exhibition of large scale photography by John Kippin and Chris Wainwright. The organisers describe it as posing the question:what role can contemporary photographic practices play in reflecting the issues of our time? It addresses issues of employment and identity in our current society by addressing how the world recession and banking crisis have created a loss of job stability and the possibility of potentially seismic change. The photographs relate to other images of the industrial north shown at the Laing. They also invoke the language of the sublime and thus directly relate to the apocalyptic visions of the nineteenth century artist John Martin whose work is one of the centrepieces of the collection.

In contrast to FUTURELAND’s focus on photography and its grave political themes, Jim Shaw’s work is playful in tone and has a massive field of enquiry. He makes use of almost every field in which the visual is used from comic book art to architectural drawing, abstract expressionism, modernist sculpture, surrealist imagery and hyperrealism. We will explore the outcome as an artistic ‘in joke’ or an ambitious attempt to chronicle the saturated information and confusion of modern life.
For a place on this study visit please email enquiries@oca-uk.com. We have allocated more places on this visit than normal to accommodate a range of visual arts interests by OCA students.