HOUSE festival returns to Brighton
If you go down to Brighton this weekend, you could be in for a big, airship-shaped surprise. Or perhaps a massive, unseasonal iceberg.
These rather apocalyptic installations mark the start of HOUSE festival, which celebrates design, art and domestic spaces.
The festival looks to take these disciplines out of their usual gallery settings and into the open, the beach and domestic spaces.
The HOUSE concept began in 2008, when festival organisers Judy Stevens and Chris Lord, the directors behind Artists Open Houses wanted to address the lack of a major arts space in Brighton.
At the centre of the festival is Mariele Neudecker’s Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes, housed in Brunswick Square’s Regency Town House, which was co-commissioned with Brighton Festival.
Using sculpture, video and photography, Neudecker’s installation takes the viewer from the top of the earth to the bottom of the ocean, with images of Arctic suns, an iceberg sculpture and light boxes depicting the sun simultaneously rising and setting in the Azores islands in the North Atlantic and Australia.
The Town House’s basement cellars will lead you ‘2000 fathoms deep’, says HOUSE, with videos showing the alien landscape of the deserted seabed, featuring a vast subaquatic mountain range.
Among the other HOUSE commissions are a series of satellite works by artists Emma Critchley, Andrew Kotting with Anonymous Bosch, Dylan Shipton & Ben Fitton and David Wightman, all themed around the idea of ‘unknowable/knowable landscapes in found spaces around Brighton’, according to organisers.
Critchley is using a 30ft shipping container on Brighton’s seafront to show her work Aria – a projections showing a figure moving underwater; while Ben Fitton & Dylan Shipton’s Monument to the Excluded Middle in St Peter’s Church Gardens takes the form of a collapsed, and ultimately useless airship.
Elsewhere in Brighton, look out for the gorgeous Boxbird Gallery’s illustration show, ThreeD.
Work from illustrators Tom Frost, Graham Carter and Helen Musselwhite will be on display showing a range of gorgeous – if rather strange – characters and critters.
HOUSE 2013 runs from 4 – 26 May at various Brighton venues. For more information visit housefestival.org
All images courtesy of HOUSE 2013
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