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The next year’s Southend Fringe Festival will take place on 4-26 June. If you are organising an event during that time, you can apply to have it included in the Festival. Read more »

An invitation to Cultural House Party on 5th December at Chalkwell Hall from 11am until 4pm.

As we wrote earlier this month, Southend Borough Council (SBC) are making a bid for Southend to become the UK’s City of Culture for 2013.

The bid will be put together by Southend on Sea Borough Council (Culture Dept) – part of the bid document is to outline an ambitious and exciting cultural programme for the year of 2013 that will demonstrate that culture is a key part of the Borough’s future.

Everyone keen to contribute their ideas to this bid, is invited to a special Cultural House Party at Chalkwell Hall in Chalkwell Park on Saturday 5th December. Drop in at any time between 11am and 4pm!

This collective brainstorming day is being organised by Arts organisation METAL, in partnership with Southend-on-Sea Borough Council. There will be plenty of tea and biscuits, some activities to participate in, and lots of opportunity for conversation and ideas.

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council’s Executive Councillor for Culture, Councillor Derek Jarvis, says:

“Southend has a huge wealth of creative and dynamic talent so we really want to involve as many people as possible in preparing this bid.

“The Council together with METAL is very keen indeed to create a vivid picture of the current cultural climate, as well as a shared ambition for what can be achieved in 2013 and beyond.

“The winning city/town will become a focus for national attention in 2013 and could host high-profile media events including the Turner Prize, BBC Sports Personality of the Year, The Brits and the RIBA Stirling Prize as part of their year in the spotlight.”

CoExist Arts Studios’ John Adams is opening a exhibition of his photographs called SOUTHEND PEOPLE at the Nelson Pub on Monday between 6-8pm.

THE NELSON PUB / North Road / Opposite TAP

Open till the end of December…

JOHN ADAMS’ work on ARTSLANT – click HERE.

The boarded shops on York Rd have been transformed into a street art gallery. Artists – but also passers by – are invited to contribute their remembrance related work. The boards will be repainted by the end of the month, but the spontaneity of the project inspired its initiator, Christine Robinson, who says she’ll now become a street artist:

IF YOU’D LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE, EMAIL CHRISTINE on seachange AT talktalk.net or simply turn up next Monday!!! Have you seen the York Road project? What did you think? Share your comments below!

A professional artist is being sought by Southend-on-Sea Borough Council to work with selected local schools and a youth group to create new pieces of artwork inspired by the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The art will decorate the hoardings surrounding the building site of the new swimming and world class diving pool at Southend Leisure & Tennis Centre during its construction and afterwards will be given to the participants to display at their school/club as a permanent Olympic legacy.

Artists are invited to submit an application by midday 1st December 2009.

Click here to download the Brief and Application Form.

Pauline Groves is having an exhibition of her work in aid of the Southend Breast Unit at IPECO Building 5, Aviation Way, Nr. Southend Airport.

This will be well sign-posted with parking available. Free admission.

3inOne exhibition opened yesterday at TAP on North Road. Here is some footage from the evening, with Duncan Crossley and Stuart Bowditch talking about their work:

3inOne is open till 5 Dec, 10-2 Thu- Fri & 10-4 Sat & Sun or by appointment: coexist AT hotmail.co.uk

For more info about the show, see the previous post.
Coexist at TAP – for more info CLICK HERE

Let’s Take Back Our Space, curated by Mike Sperlinger includes works by Robert Morris, Marianne Wex and Cerith Wyn Evans. Body language is, as the late Big Brother has taught us, inescapable. How we read, record, imitate and interpret gestures informs everything about our daily lives, from culture and convention to our most ‘natural’ and intimate relationships. ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’ brings together the work of three artists – Robert Morris, Marianne Wex and Cerith Wyn Evans – who, in their radically different ways, explore body language as something at once urgent and inherently ambiguous.

The show takes its title from an encyclopaedic photographic project by the German artist Marianne Wex. Over several years in the mid-1970s Wex, who had originally been a painter, built up an extraordinary archive of thousands of images of people, which she began to categorise according to their body language. Mixing her own street photographs with images clipped from newspapers and advertisements, she cumulatively catalogued the way that male and female identities were formed and reinforced through everyday gestures; the way, as she put it, that they ‘took up space’.

Wex’s photographic project is accompanied by two other works in the exhibition. The first is Robert Morris’s 21.3 (1964); originally a performance made by the artist while he was studying and teaching art history in New York, the action was subsequently re-staged with an actor and filmed by Babette Mangolte in 1994. In the work, the performer lip-synchs a famous art history lecture by Erwin Panofsky called ‘Studies in Iconology’ from 1939, which discusses the different levels of how we understand the everyday gesture of someone raising their hat – a typical greeting of the era, which might now seem quaint.

The second accompanying moving image work is Cerith Wyn Evans’s Kim Wilde Audition Tapes (1996), which, we are told, consists of footage the artist discovered in a skip in Soho. Male models audition in a studio for a role in a pop video, responding to the off-screen director’s prompts to act naturally with excruciating self-consciousness. Under the cold eye of the camera, body language and male sexuality are manufactured for commercial ends.

Listen to Marianne Wex talking about her project HERE
The exhibition is open until 14 December 2009.

Focal Point Gallery WEBSITE

Westcliff Art Trail was started by Westcliff Artists in 2008 with the aim to improve the cultural profile of the area, inspired by comments from residents who wanted more visual arts to be promoted and showcased locally.

Aspiring and established artists who live or work in the SS0 or the SS1 areas exhibit their work for a week in May. They use local business premises and community areas in and around Hamlet Court Road as gallery spaces.

The work varies in media and includes oils, screen-printing, ceramics, 3D, digital and textiles. Participation in the Trail provides opportunities to raise cultural aspirations for local people, offering opportunities for creative engagement on an individual basis and also raising awareness of career pathways within the creative and cultural industries.

Next year’s Westcliff Art Trail will take place betwen 14-22 May
The deadline for application is 7 January 2009. Any Southend artists can apply but the priority will be given to those with SS0 and SS postcodes.

CLICK HERE for the APPLICATION FORM or email: organiser AT westcliffarttrail.co.uk