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

Events

Contrail Cirrus: the impact of aviation on climate change

7 March 2024

Exhibitions

Tree Story @ Liverpool ONE

16 February 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

Events

Plant a seed. Seed sow and in conversation with Plot2Plate

16 March 2024

Events

Waterlands: creative writing workshop

23 March 2024

Events

Erosion: panel discussion

9 March 2024

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

Past Events

Sandra Suubi ‘Samba Gown’ Procession

9 September 2023

Exhibitions Future Exhibitions

A Place of Our Own

29 September - 22 December 2023

Past Events

POETRY BOOK LAUNCH: JACK BENNETT – LUNETTE

7 September 2023

Exhibitions

A Portrait of the High Street @ Prescot

31 August 2023

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Still Outside (Or Unexplained)

22 June - 2 September 2012

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 Homereveals 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 Gallery 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 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 Gallery 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.

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 Homereveals 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 Gallery 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 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 Gallery 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.

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