Exhibitions

Shifting Horizons @ Digital Window Gallery

27 March - 31 March 2024

PLATFORM: ISSUE 6

26 March 2024

Events

Saturday Town: Launch Event

10 April 2024

Exhibitions

Coming Soon: Saturday Town

11 April - 18 May 2024

Past Events

PLATFORM: ZINE LAUNCH EVENT

21 March 2024

Home. Ukrainian Photography, UK Words: Tour

4 March - 28 February 2025

Exhibitions

Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words @ New Adelphi

4 March - 8 March 2024

Past Events

CREATIVE SOCIAL: IN THE ABSENCE OF FORMAL GROUND

2 March 2024

Exhibitions

We Feed The UK @ Exterior Walls

8 February - 31 March 2024

Past Events

Contrail Cirrus: the impact of aviation on climate change

7 March 2024

Exhibitions

Tree Story @ Liverpool ONE

16 February - 1 May 2024

Open Source #27: Saffron Lily – In The Absence of Formal Ground @ Digital Window Gallery

6 February - 31 March 2024

Past Events

Contemporary Photography from Ukraine: Symposium @University of Salford

4 March - 5 March 2024

Past Events

Is Anybody Listening? Symposium: Commissioning and Collecting Socially Engaged Photography

29 February 2024

Past Events

Different approaches: Artists working with scientists

15 February 2024

Events

LOOK Climate Lab 2024: All Events

18 January 2024

Exhibitions

Diesel & Dust @ Digital Window Gallery

18 January - 31 March 2024

Events

Tree Walks Of Sefton Park with Andrea Ku

21 January 2024

Past Events

Artists Remake the World by Vid Simoniti: Book Launch

31 January 2024

Past Events

Shift Liverpool Open Meeting

6 February 2024

Past Events

We Feed The UK Launch and LOOK Climate Lab 2024 Celebration

8 February 2024

Past Events

Cyanotype workshop with Melanie King

17 February 2024

Past Events

End of Empire: artist talk and discussion

22 February 2024

Past Events

Book Launch: What The Mine Gives, The Mine Takes

24 February 2024

Past Events

Local ecology in the post-industrial era: open discussion

14 March 2024

Past Events

Waterlands: creative writing workshop

23 March 2024

Past Events

Plant a seed. Seed sow and in conversation with Plot2Plate

16 March 2024

Past Events

Erosion: panel discussion

9 March 2024

Past Events

Waterlands: an evening of poetry and photographs

23 March 2024

Events

Force For Nature Exhibition

27 March - 28 March 2024

Voices of Nature: Interactive Performances

28 March 2024

Past Events

Sum of All Parts: Symposium

27 February 2024

Exhibitions Main Exhibition

LOOK Climate Lab 2024

18 January - 31 March 2024

Past Events

MA Socially engaged photography Open Day event

1 February 2023

Past Events

Tish: Special screening and Q&A

13 December 2023

Past Events

Book Launch: A Look At A New Perspective

23 November 2023

Events

Community workshops @ Ellesmere Port Library

6 November - 5 February 2024

Past Events

Book Launch: ‘544m’ By Kevin Crooks

30 November 2023

Past Exhibitions

Bernice Mulenga @ Open Eye Gallery Atrium Space

17 November - 17 December 2023

Past Events

Bernice Mulenga: Artist Talk

18 November 2023

Past Exhibitions

Local Roots @ The Atkinson

14 October 2023

Exhibitions

Community @ Ellesmere Port Library

26 October - 11 April 2024

Past Events

Critique Surgery for Socially Engaged Photographers

6 November 2023

Past Events

Deeds Not Words: panel discussion

12 October 2023

Past Exhibitions

Deeds Not Words @ Atrium Space

3 October - 22 October 2023

Ode To Our Space @ Digital Window Gallery

29 September - 23 December 2023

A Look At A New Perspective @ Digital Window Gallery

29 September - 23 December 2023

Past Events

Book Launch: Crow Dark Dawn

19 October 2023

Past Events

Exhibition Launch: A Place of Our Own

28 September 2023

Reflections

12 September - 22 December 2023

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I Used To Think You Were Normal © Sam Hutchinson, 2015/16
Open 2: Pieces of You, Open Eye Gallery © Paul Karalius, 2016
I Used To Think You Were Normal © Sam Hutchinson, 2015/16
Open 2: Pieces of You, Open Eye Gallery © Paul Karalius, 2016
I Used To Think You Were Normal © Sam Hutchinson, 2015/16
Open 2: Pieces of You, Open Eye Gallery © Paul Karalius, 2016

Artist Interview: Sam Hutchinson

Pauline Rowe: How and why did you become an artist?

Sam Hutchinson: I have no idea how I became an artist, I’ve always enjoyed making, sculpting and painting since being a child, and the mediums I work with now are a natural progression of years of experimenting with different media and working out which I feel the most comfortable using.

 

PR: You are very interested in Kant’s idea that there’s no objective property of a thing that makes it beautiful.  Can you say a bit more about this in relation to your own aesthetics?

SH: I am very interested in Kant. My graduate work (The) Anarchy of Aesthetic & Judgement was a large study loosely taking items from Kant’s Critique of Judgement and studying certain aspects of them. I strongly feel that everything exists as an abstract concept unless it is put into context, and in terms of aesthetics, everything can be re-arranged and re-contextualised to produce different ideas; using images as a creative language that can be manipulated ‘for’ or ‘against’ whichever side you come from. A large part of this is taking into consideration how we process images too, and this leads on to how they can be manipulated for our own benefit. As a predominantly image based artist, I like to test how we process the differences between the physical and the constructed and make decisions about what we see within an image. There are a lot of inbuilt and natural responses to images that work without logic or reason, and my work acts in ways like a study of these situations.

 

PR: Can you say something about the camera you prefer to use and why? 

SH: Cameras and equipment aren’t important to me. Personally I just want to obtain the image, so the camera is really only giving context to my work. I like the fact that a phone image looks like a phone image, or that the work in I Used to Think You Were Normal can be reduced to bare pixels when the images are seen at large-scale. This gives the images various depths, and can draw you back into realising that what you are looking at is made up from these small squares of colour. With this work being photographed off a curved, glass screen, the bars of light projecting the image on the screen are very visible, and I like to see the entire body of work as being interchangeable. All images can exist as crops of themselves, and appear multiple times in different forms.

 

PR: How do you select, edit, process your images and then decide on a final sequence and order etc.,?

SH: Depending on what I feel like showing, the mass of images can be seen as purely texture, or objects, portraits, or studio based studies, yet it all directs you to the same outcome. Some are more visual than others, and I like the idea that each time this work is displayed it can take into consideration those I am working with, and let others influence and manipulate how the final edit will be. Rather like the manipulation of the mind when it comes to influencing children and adults, these factors depend on its agendas for broadcasting, whether they will be hidden or not. This is also another part to the work that I see as a main concept, in that like a performance it can be adapted and changed in meaning rather than exist in concrete.

 

PR: What was compelling about the subject matter, the 90s TV quiz show Crystal Maze, and your medium?

SH: A lot of this work stems from trying to understand what influenced me as a child, not only positive influences, but trying to understand my rationale for my judgement and where this came from. I think a lot about ideas which I used to hold without reason – as my younger self I was trying to comprehend the meanings of the world and what goes on, and especially when you’re consistently learning, I feel you can make judgements that you hold onto for a while until you start growing up, then you begin to question these.

I don’t watch too much television anymore. Since being born I constantly watched TV, and I became very interested in looking back to how I understood what I saw on the screen. It has always seemed like a different world, like a non-reality that you understand as being real. It’s just that little bit harder to visualise that the people on the screen are like ourselves, it’s always struck me as a bit disconnected. It’s like how you assume that a photograph depicts reality whereas it has been directed as such, and manipulated by the photographer to depict their vision of the content.

Gameshows and the related programmes are the most bizarre in that they use the contestants as the entertainment, in fictional scenarios and settings that are either made to look authentic or made to look completely alien. There isn’t much in-between. I liked the idea of taking these out of context, as well as the locations being very visual and sculptural. The human element is interesting in that the contestants are acting as players to win a prize, a game, money, a holiday etc., – all of which are presented like treasures or sacred artefacts. Yet they are also playing for entertainment, and for the entertainment of the audience.

 

PR: To whom does the “I” and “You” refer in the title?

SH: These pronouns I feel I like to use come from the way in which the TV as an object comes directly between the viewer and programme, ‘them and us’. So onto the title of the project, ‘I Used to Think You Were Normal’, the ‘I’ refers to myself, and the ‘you’ refers to the whole TV itself as an object, but also that of the countless programmes in which influenced me to understand their content as something very ‘normal’ as a commonplace practice, as if all adults would be gameshow contestants at some point, that it was something ‘we’ all did as humans. As if what I saw on the screen was ‘normal’!

 

PR: Would it be fair to see your work as questioning or distrusting the imagination as well as judgement of yourself as a child?

SH: I feel that the work questions the imagination as well as judgement, however I don’t feel that it really is directly critical of any of any of these ideas, rather determining an understanding of how it can predetermine judgement and its outcomes. So maybe distrust isn’t something I would encourage, instead a ‘question everything’ approach, being logical about judgement and our understanding of what we see and process. I do also see television as a form of religious object, in the sense that so much blind trust and belief is placed into the screen, this could be again linked to how staged and detached from reality television programmes can be, being young and naive I always felt that it had to be fact what was fed to me, yet I now realise anyone can have an agenda.

 

PR: Is there some regret that your imagination was disrespected in some way by the world of television?

SH: I feel no regret by my imagination being manipulated as I feel the aesthetics are really something, certain sculptural elements to these TV shows have always amazed me, I guess the human element is the bit that slightly troubles me. It’s more thinking about the set design and the fact that these locations are completely one of a kind and designed to replicate something real, that they only appear within these games. It changes our perception of what we are looking at. I guess these elements interest me a lot more. Especially in the way that they link with photography, for example, the way in which the TV film camera composes the screens to hide the edges of the set, its a contained representation of what actually exists outside of that composition, just as if it were a photographer framing an image. I think technology has the ability to make these environments possible. To me they appear as studies into looking objectively at these locations and re-contextualising them to give them a platform to be analysed for their visual forms and similarities. It is a questioning about the way in which we understand reality.

 

Poems for further reading linked to some of the ideas in Sam Hutchinson’s work:

The Synthetic A Priori: Kathleen Graber

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241276

 

The Vacation: Wendell Berry

http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/425.html

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Wallace Stevens

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503

A PDF pack containing interviews with each of the artists exhibiting in Open 2: Pieces of You is available to download here.

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