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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.

Previous Unit1 Exhibitions:
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
The Fire Sermon, Enamel on BoardUnit1 @ 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.
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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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’.
Gary Kearney, Lloyd Hughes, Jack Squires and Callum Whitley
PV: Monday 9th August 6-9pm
Open: 10th - 15th August 2-6pm
'Repertory' brings together the current work of Gary Kearney, Lloyd Hughes, Jack Squires and Callum Whitley, four BA Fine Art students studying at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Four artists who are united in their work, not necessarily in terms of theme or narrative, but the manner in which they treat there chosen subject matter. Whether there discussions are based on form, colour, pattern, materiality, structure, memory or society all the artists begin to find a middle ground as they strip down and decode there area of interest and begin to understand what initially sparked there investigations. The process of repetition holds a great amount of significance to each of the artist's experimentation and the development of their visual language. The use of repetition may not be important in the conscious thinking of the artist’s practice but remains a prominent and distinctive feature in how the work is structured and builds momentum towards a resolution.
The exhibition will feature collage and sculpture as well as wall and floor installation pieces from the four artist's current body of work.



Open: Wednesday 6th May - Saturday 9th May, 12noon-6pm
Preview: Wednesday 6th May 6-8pm
Hall & Sweeney present a body of work that looks at the effortless
ways in which technology has allowed people to class themselves as
‘a creative’. Constantly we have access, via the Internet,
to art and media that purports itself to be of value. The content on
offer to us is mostly, nothing more than self-indulgence.
Never before have such powerful tools been available to the mass of
society to realise ideas. But with these tools, the individuals
creative output is becoming a pre-determined homogeny of instantly
gratifying results leaving the ‘creative type’ marveling in
their own glory, whilst the viewer left with feelings of
déjà vu.
IDLE humorously reacts to this form of lazy creativity and questions
the quality, originality and ownership of output from these
‘art-at-a-click-of-a-mouse’ packages and devices. Idle
pushes the viewer to be fully complicit as spectator, subject and
performer.
Parts of the exhibition contain explicit references that are not
suitable for those under the age of 18 or for those who are easily
offended.
Thomas Hall & Thomas Sweeney are both artists who use technology as
tools for creating art works. Both Hall and Sweeney are East Midlands
based. This is the first time they have artistically collaborated
together.