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Selected Curated Projects & Exhibitions

60 DRAWINGS + TEN

Sixty Drawings + Ten

SIXTY DRAWINGS + TEN is a group exhibition covering a range of drawing styles and practices, co-curated by artists Carolyn Curtis Magri, Gary James Williams and Gaynor Seville, Creative Director at the Whitaker which will be open to the public from 16 June to 11 August 2022 at the Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery in Rawtenstall, Rossendale.

In 2012, Curtis Magri was inspired to celebrate drawing as a discipline by project managing and curating an exhibition of 60 artists’ drawings entitled ’60 Drawings’ at Bankley Gallery in Levenshulme, Manchester with Williams. Sixty artists from Manchester Studio Groups and Manchester Metropolitan University were invited to exhibit one drawing each.

Ten years on, the second iteration of the project, entitled 60 Drawings + Ten, takes place at the Whitaker.

Sixty Drawings + Ten explores, defines and celebrates the practice and the locality of drawing in its diverse forms. Artists, from a range of different disciplines who exhibited in the first exhibition in 2012 in Manchester, will present a new work, alongside other selected artists to celebrate a decade of the project’s development and to exhibit at The Whitaker.

The curatorial theme remains the consistent thread running through all iterations of the project, which continues to pose such key questions as: where can drawing be situated in an artist’s practice? Does it come after, before or during? Is drawing secondary or primary?

Sixty Drawings + Ten is accompanied by a dedicated project website designed by ToBeContent which delivers images, biographies and statements from all participating artists, along with a range of associated material: https://60plus10.com/

Visitors are invited to the Whitaker Museum on Thursday 16 June from 7pm for the official opening of the exhibition. Artists Nicola Dale and Kevin Dalton Johnson will stage live performances on the opening night.

On 14 July an accompanying Q/A event featuring five of the exhibiting artists will be in a ‘curated conversation’ with art historian Sara Riccardi (Art Across). Each of the artists will present their practice, while Sara will draw connections between their contemporary work, artist’s themes and artwork from the past.

Carolyn Curtis Magri & Gary James Williams 2022

60 DRAWINGS + TEN

Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery,

Rawtenstall, Rossendale. UK. 2022

60 Drawings

60 Drawings

As a starting point, a process and an end in itself, 60 artists have been invited to submit one drawing, in an exhibition that lays bare the tradition of drawing in individual contemporary practices. 

With the democracy of open submission, ‘60 DRAWINGS’ is curated by Carolyn Curtis-Magri & Gary James Williams and intends to explore, define and celebrate the locality and discipline of drawing in its diverse forms within the practices of the participating artists.

Carolyn Curtis Magri & Gary James Williams 2012

’60 Drawings’

Bankley Gallery,

Manchester UK. 2012

‘Phenomena: 11 North West Artists

coming to terms with the everyday.    

                                       

‘Phenomena: 11 North West artists coming to terms

with the everyday’

Curated by Gary James Williams and being the first of four successive summer exhibitions to be staged at Bankley Studios Gallery, ‘Phenomena: 11 North West artists coming to terms with the everyday’ gratefully brings together the work of 11 contemporary artists practicing in the North West, who are steadily gaining attention both nationally and internationally.

This exhibtion intends to examine the diversity of approaches and processes appropriated through the motivations, responses and preoccupations in the selected artists’ ongoing practices. A common ground is established in this exhibition, through what is perceived and established as the everyday and its resurfacing through contextual issues and interventions within contemporary art practice. There is a clear and reflective objectivity in the collective works in this exhibition, as in Vincent Canning’s outsized poetic soap blocks and Adela Jone’s ceiling hung toilet tissue weaving into organic domesticated forms. The disturbing ritual familiarity of Andrea Gregson’s reconstructed cutlery pieces ‘Feast’, Claire Wilkinson’s bared, strung up layers of clothing and the girly abstractions found weaving through Maggie Ayliffe’s diptych painting ‘Accessorise Accessorise Accessorise’, we discover an opening of more quieter forces and vulnerabilities.

In the emergence of new semiotic vocabularies found in Brenden Fletcher’s large scale utopic painting and Michaella Ross’s painting focused on the repositioning and repurposing of a domestic scenario, the works in this exhibition communicate an unmistakable immediacy. At times, this strategically perpetuates the proposition of an overwhelming authenticity which is instantaneously recognisable. In their individual practices the artists collaborate to define and redefine what is considered public and private, where a uniqueness remains distinctly familiar in the resurfacing of more formal issues within their synonymous creative ecologies.

With works from Astra Beck, Phillip Kennedy and Sally Mees, this exhibition openly challenges our perspective of the everyday, leaving an open debate of uncertainty. Not necessarily dependent on the demands of the spectator, but welcoming, as in the work by Gary James Williams, in which a security door viewer beckons the audience to peer through a lens into a apparent other world and experience and question the work itself. The exhibition as a whole gives a responsibility of authorship and personal censorship, of what we willingly accept and absorb through our own day to day experiences in an asserting physicality of masquerade, desire, spirituality and gender roles and positions.

Gary James Williams 2001

‘Phenomena: 11 North West artists coming to terms

with the everyday’

Bankley Gallery,

Manchester, UK. 2001

©️ Gary James Williams