David Blandy: Child of the Atom
Seventeen Gallery,
17 Kingsland Road,
London E2 8AA
Thursday 2 September – Saturday 2 October 2010
Free
A piece of family lore regarding David Blandy’s grandfather, held as a POW in Malaya and Taiwan from 1942, provides the genesis of this latest solo exhibition from Blandy, Child of the Atom.
Generated by an underlying guilt about his own and also his daughter’s existence, Blandy’s exhibition presents an installation and a film which documents their visit to Hiroshima to literally and symbolically search for their ‘origins’. The film oscillates between moments of intimacy between the artist and his daughter and the dramatic and violent scenes of stylized explosion witnessed or caused by the Child of the Atom.
The installation in the main gallery space displays artifacts, ephemera, novels, comics and toys that examine some of the manifestations of the bombings in global popular culture. The installation alludes to a communal space in a Japanese youth hostel, and as is custom in Japanese accommodation, visitors will be required to leave their shoes at the door.
David Blandy has established his artistic terrain through a series of investigations into the cultural forces that inform and influence him, construct his identity, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer games and manga. His works slip between performance and video, reality and construct, using references sampled from the wide, disparate sources that provide his (and our own) sense of self.
This latest work is perhaps Blandy’s most intimate and direct piece of self-examination and follows directly from the earlier works which sought to question how much of a Western sense of identity can be constructed from diverse popular sources.
More details at http://www.seventeengallery.com/index.php?p=3
Filed under: EVENT, FILM AND VIDEO, GRAPHIC ART, HISTORY, INSTALLATION, TRAVEL, VISUAL ARTS, art, free, london
[...] More about Child of the Atom from last year’s exhibition at Seventeen Gallery: http://freeartlondon.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/david-blandy-is-a-child-of-the-atom/ [...]