January at Mostyn Oriel

I took a trip up to north Wales last weekend to see Gareth Griffith's exhibition Shelter at Mostyn Oriel in which I had a small piece of work. The show was really lovely (it closed on 15th January), about 60 artists had contributed and the work was shown on a simple trestle table as a 'field' of shelters. A crazy artists campsite of miniature dwellings! All sorts of ingenious solutions had been devised to the brief to make a shelter 20 x 20 x 15 cm out of found materials or materials to hand.

I was also glad to get to see the other shows currently running in the gallery, Ha Ha Road in the main gallery space takes a look at the use of humour in contemporary art - "The selected artworks demonstrate how acts of absurdity, irrationality or playfulness can interrupt reality and momentarily destabilise common assumptions." The perfect antidote to post-Christmas gloom, many of the works genuinely raised a smile. 

Grazia Toderi - Orbite Rossa - seen here

I also enjoyed Grazia Toderi's video Orbite Rossa installed in gallery 6 as part of the gallery's Love Video series. Night-time cityscapes are layered and superimposed  in a slowly changing vista of lights. The result is a mesmerizing and slightly disorientating experience, the gradual alterations to the landscape and the impossible movements of light within it set up beautiful. "...luminous geometries...". Personally, I saw a kind of melancholic dystopia - Blade Runner came to mind with its nocturnal rooftop city scenes - a balance of beauty and sadness in the universal city-at-night.