40 Years of the Future: WINDOWS and Degrees of Duality at Castlefield Gallery
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
Castefield Gallery’s anniversary programme 40 Years of the Future may be coming to an end but it’s finishing in style – the final celebrations include multiple new, large-scale artist commissions in the gallery and beyond.
Audiences can admire two individual displays: WINDOWS from Matthew Wood and Degrees of Duality from Kay Shah.
Wood’s WINDOWS project sees the artist creating large-scale monochrome drawings in acrylic, applied directly onto the walls and windows of Castlefield’s double height space, as well as the high street at New Art Spaces: Chester and New Art Spaces: Warrington (these are Castlefield’s project and exhibition spaces located in public areas allowing artists a more direct link between their work and audiences, without the barrier of an institution).
The artist’s drawings are fluid and loose yet with impeccable attention to detail, portraying the humour, tragedy and paradoxes of human nature by observing and depicting people’s interactions. Wood collects fleeting moments and reveals them in thick, monochrome lines. The size of his work adds to the effect, surrounding the viewer in the scene they’re witnessing.
British-Pakistani artist Kay Shah’s Degrees of Duality utilises the gallery space to combine motifs from different cultural traditions, such as the predominantly European fleur-de-lis to the geometric patterns often found in Pakistani architecture. His bi-cultural identity plays out in the form of spatial design, combining physical and digital elements and confusing our perceptions, with pattern, colour and three-dimensional forms.
The resulting installation is not a closed environment though – the room is designed in a way that invites creative activities, for other artists and local communities. Check Castlefield Gallery’s website for more information on the events that are taking place throughout the exhibition, including talks, readings, screenings, performances and workshops.
The top floor of the gallery is a pop-up shop with prints from the Castlefield Gallery’s portfolio available for sale along with significant special editions, as well as a social space where visitors can also take a closer look at ephemera from the gallery’s 40 year archive.
