'Unit1' is The Great Central's hire programme. If you would like to hire our gallery space for exhibitions, photography, filming or anything else please, get in touch: unit1@thegreatcentral.org We welcome all enquiries.
 

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Next Unit1 Exhibition:

The Great Central Open 22 Prize Part II:

 

Steven Ingman & Mik Godley
 
HOME INSECURITIES
 
‘An Exhibition of Contemporary Landscape Paintings' 
 
Preview: Friday 24th June 6-9pm

Opening times: 12pm - 6pm
Sat 25th June
Sunday 26th June
Friday 1st July
Sat 2nd July
Sunday 3rd July

 

Steven Ingman: “Wolf Gang”

Steven Ingman’s paintings reflect on memories and self discovery influenced by retracing the steps of a former stomping ground. Close to where he grew up a mile down a beaten track hidden behind a wall of hedgerow is a deserted quarry. This forgotten place now overgrown and left to nature’s devices, is a mixture of fens, marshes and swamps. The densely compacted trees, abandoned buildings and machinery offer a post apocalyptic landscape yet ironically this place offered a gang of kids an escape from reality. Now through adult eyes, Ingman attempts to understand a place he failed to understand as an adolescent.

Recent exhibitions and projects include 2008 Derby Open - First Prize Winner, 2009 Arts Council England Award, Solo show Night Light 2010 Derby Museum and Art Gallery, British Art Show 7 Sideshow - Wunderkammen and Mik’s Front room - Nottingham, Leicester Open - Great Central Award and Attenborough shortlist, Opem 2011 The Collection Lincoln


Mik Godley “Der Riese - the bunker paintings”

Like Ingman, Godley highlights incongruities in ideas of landscape and home – in this case Heimat – though a home he has only visited virtually. These paintings based on low-resolution internet sourced jpegs depict surface installations from Albert Speers' project Der Riese (the Giant) on the mountains of Gory Sowie (Eulengebirge) in the Sudeten range overlooking his mothers birthplace in Lower Silesia.

Developed since 2003 "Considering Silesia" has been exhibited from San Francisco to Zagreb, featured in several publications, received awards and critical acclaim.
Recent exhibitions and projects include Edinburgh Art Festival, London Art Fair, Nettie Horn Gallery, London, Nottingham Contemporary, Angel Row Gallery and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

The Great Central Open Prize is awarded annually to two regional artists selected from The City Gallery’s annual Open exhibition. This year both artists, Harman Dickinson and Steve Ingram, have been given solo shows too showcase their work.

 

 

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Previous Unit1 Exhibitions:

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The Great Central Open 22 Prize Part I:

Harman Dickinson
 
MISGUIDED
 
‘The best of a bad bunch. Works hard, but his ideas are one-track and misguided.’ 
Grammar school report dated 1956, aged 14. 
 
Preview: Friday 10th June 6-9pm

Opening times: 12pm - 6pm
Sat 11th June
Sunday 12th June
Friday 17th June
Sat 18th June
Sunday 19th June

Unit1 @ The Great Central is very pleased to present MISGUIDED, the first of two exhibitions as part of The Great Central Open 22 Prize.

The 20 uniformly-sized enamel paintings on show comprise a series of graphically exacting narratives in which absurdity and apocalypse rub shoulders.  As we go about our business we are upheaved by irruptions into our world of the other-worldly, waylaid by outrageous prospects and lured into incomprehensible dilemmas.  Dickson has little to say by way of explanation of the genesis of these works: "The best of them arise unplanned as spontaneous mental images, and the challenge is then to faithfully transpose them into visual images.  I do admit to some perversity and mischievousness in all this."  Because his content and style bear little relation to whatever else might be going on in the art environment, Dickson's work has sometimes been categorised as "Outsider Art", but one commentator has coined an alternative phrase - "Alongsider Art" - to denote his stance of seeming to be in the world while clearly not being of it.

The four larger oil paintings represent an earlier way of working, which proved more painstaking and time-consuming and less spontaneous than the enamel paintings.  Working with quick-drying enamel paint precludes the kind of naturalistic tone-blending and striving after realism that his strictly representational oil painting required, making it possible to employ purity of colour and simplicity of design, and also to work more prolifically.   

Harman Dickson (aka Malcolm Dickson) was born in west London in 1941, studied at Hammersmith College of Art, and since 1965 has exhibited widely, having one-man and group shows in London, Los Angeles, Brussels, Osnabruck, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Derby.  Four of his paintings are in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and his work has won numerous awards, including East Midlands Artist of the Year (Drawings category) 1991.  He worked for many years as an art therapist with psychiatric patients at several mental health trusts in Nottingham and as a ceramics therapist with the visually impaired.  At present he works part-time as a stress counsellor at a mental health charity in Derby.

The Great Central Gallery exhibition is the result of an award from the gallery for a painting shown in 2010 at the Leicester open 22 Exhibition, which was also shortlisted for the Attenborough Prize.  The works currently on show represent Dickson's entire output over the last six years, since all his other works were lost in an arson attack that destroyed his home in Nottingham.    

 

The Great Central Open Prize is awarded annually to two regional artists selected from The City Gallery’s annual Open exhibition. This year both artists, Harman Dickinson and Steve Ingram, have been given solo shows too showcase their work. The second of these exhibitions is Steve Ingman with Mik Godfrey, it will open with a preview  6 - 9pm on Friday 24th June and then is open 12-6pm on Sat 25th, Sun 26th then Fri 1st, Sat 2nd and Sun 3rd July.

 

 

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THRIVE

“Thrive” brings together the current work of six De Montfort University students:Joanna James, Melissa Robinson, Lisa Pow, Lizzie Geurtsen, and a collaboration between Sam Hirst and Clark Mitton.

The work primarily focuses on painting and sculpture and although not connected though aesthetic appearances there are running themes which link each individual artist together. There are influences of nature, architecture, light, and balance running throughout the work and each artist has used repetition and form in their work to come to a resolved conclusion to their chosen subject. 

The exhibition will include; paintings that experiment with the use of paint, colour and light, an intricately balanced sculpture piece that dances with balance and gravity and wall and floor based sculptures which drift between vertical and horizontal positioning.

 

 

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Boom

Matthew Everatt

Matthew Everatt premieres his latest film ‘Boom’.

The 25-minute, multi-screen video projection is a record of a 500-mile journey - part art project, part expedition, (part fundraising for charity). The piece depicts notions of travel, assorted landscapes, locations & events surrounding a trip, which began with a fixation on a word, leading to a pilgrimage of sorts.

The work combines slow-moving shots of scenic views - sparse intervals and pensive scenes, accounts of absence meeting an assemblage of communal celebration & collective gatherings.

The final destination of the journey was a town named Boom - by coincidence or fortune, Boom was celebrating 700 years of its history that year, with the church holding a devotion to ‘Maria’ event and a procession through the streets.

This is a meditation on sights seen whilst on an excursion to a place visited, the motivations to do so, not immediately apparent or openly stated.

A sense of nostalgia and documenting a kind of history, exist within the artists work and recent films encompass questioning ideas of performance & practice, the consequences of a cause & effect proposition, which in relation to this latest film – Boom, is revealed with a similarly transitory & ephemeral tone. An example of this, are the scenes consisting of patterns & rhythms of light – abstract, yet tangible…

The project; incorporates the journey itself, the film on display at the Great Central & a limited edition book designed by the artist – the opening night of the exhibition also being the launch night for the books release.

The book will be available to purchase throughout the exhibition, featuring the artist’s photographs, essays & contributions from associates, providing a context to the project and examining the nature of ‘Boom’. 

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SEQUENCE
Daniel Kelly, Emily Warren and Daniel Goodwin

Private View: Mon 29th March 6-9pm
Open: Tue 30th March - Sat 3rd April 1-5pm



This exhibition brings together the work of three artists currently studying BA Fine Art at DMU; Daniel Kelly, Emily Warren and Daniel Goodwin. Working primarily with Sculpture and Video, these artists use repetition, pattern and code to create work which drifts in and out of sequence, existing somewhere between the two. The exhibition will include multi-channel video works, sound sculpture and super 8 loops.