Two Galleries

Sometime in the mid-90s I visited Southampton art gallery with the school and one piece has stuck in my mind since then, a giant ink pad, stuck to the wall, that was it, literally a large navy blue rectangle. At the time it seemed a completely pointless waste of wall space and despite having since learnt that this work by Abigail Lane represents the possibilities of traces that could be left, I'm still not convinced of its validity. 
I remember nothing else about my other visit to the gallery back then except that I enjoyed being there with my Nan. 

Anyway, lately I've been trying to engage in things on my doorstep and given that Southampton actually has two free art galleries merely minutes walk away from each other, I thought I'd take a look at them both and see what I thought. 

First up then, was the Southampton Art Gallery, the one I visited years ago and witnessed the ink pad. First of all, it's a lot smaller than I remembered - that does tend to be the case when comparing adult sized trips to childhood ones but it seemed more pronounced than usual. Still, unless I somehow managed to miss a side room or something, it definitely felt more condensed. 

Most of the art here is oil on canvas but there's a couple of exhibitions on at the moment which provided some variety, one dealing with surrealism.

I picked this one for a photo because it reminds me of a 90s rave flyer, to be honest. 

There's also a few rooms based around the 'Avebury Papers', I visited Avebury quite recently in another misguided effort to take photos of things so I was quite pleased to see that, there's some 3D stereoscopic stuff which effectively rendered Averbury in concentric layers and a room with a projector and these odd cloth figures dealing with the genesis of Avebury (as far as I could tell, the audio was far too quiet) 

There's a Monet painting in the gallery, it's nice and probably worth an absolute fortune but my favourite of this visit and of the day in fact, was this one - The Dunes near Haarlem by Jacob van Ruisdael. 

I found the lighting really dramatic, the dead tree is the star of this with the people in the painting just existing within this world and not being the focus. 

The header photo for this post was taken ages ago but has been one of my favourite pictures I've taken - one of my earlier attempts from wandering Southampton around Christmas so lots of colours going on in the reflections. 

The John Hansard gallery used to exist on campus at Southampton University and I never knew about it, in 2018 it reopened in a new location opposite the guild hall. 

It's a nice building with a large foyer area on entry, an area selling merchandise, books and prints and some stairs up to a mezzanine gallery and beyond. I went upstairs first and found some transport themed stuff. 

I'm saying transport because I haven't used buses and trains enough to properly identify the particular pattern used on these seats but I think most people that have stepped foot on either would recognise this scene of rubbish jammed in between the seats, although perhaps not levitating 3 foot in the air. 

This suit is likely ridiculously hot and impractical, scratchy too.

I took photos of all of these things because they were weird but I wasn't really able to derive any sort of meaning from it. That's on me, though, and not really a comment on the artist - I suspect that, to a real art connoisseur, this installation says something more than the sum of its parts, just like the Abigail Lane ink pad I moaned about in the 90s. 

My favourite part of the gallery was at the back, on the ground floor. An immersive room, dealing with loss and grief within black and diaspora communities. I've since learnt that this is part of larger performance piece called 'Echoes of Care' (I think, apologies if this is unrelated but it seems to match up with what I read on the day). I spent a couple of minutes with the waves and star/nebula type patterns projecting on the floor.

I enjoyed wandering around the John Hansard Gallery but I took less from it than the Southampton one to be honest - staff were friendly although ever present which made me feel a little awkward - again, that's on me more than on them, if I hadn't been so confused by the visuals I probably would've felt a bit less conspicuous. It feels like the space is a little under utilised, a couple of empty rooms could probably benefit from something inside. 

Still it was well worth visiting these two galleries but please don't take this blog post as a review of either of them - I just wanted a record of my day checking them out.