The work on show in this co-authorship exhibition TALKING PINK was created by Alison Medd and Paul Rogers and investigated and explored ideas and images based around the colour PINK..
Interacting with the photography the contemporary art practice of Alison has a different approach and provided contrasting emphasis and vitality to the exhibition in its enquiry around the subject. Stories collected from children and their families were explored and their words made the colour exist invisibly in this space. Dialogue is a contraction from the Greek words for through and words. Today children catalogue and categorise their everyday through a visual frame. Emoji’s and’ likes’ replace the human response; what is read is frequently lost but what is spoken can be passed down through generations. Scientist David Bohm considers dialogue as a kind of creative catalyst for a group so this project TALKING PINK aims to trigger an intergenerational discourse on what the colour pink means to them and their families. As children’s author Lois Lowry said ‘Memories need to be shared.’
The photographic images were collected ‘street photography’ which were meant to complement and balance Alison’s eclectic, investigative approach to pink.
A.C. Grayling says…’ The history of collecting illuminates something striking: the human mind’s unquenchable curiosity, and its love for the wonder of the world’ – in this case TALKING PINK. The images are what most street photography is about – questioning; collecting; creating or snapping the ‘strange and mundane’; developing contexts; encouraging one thing to lead to another and allowing thinking about things we didn’t know or hadn’t seriously thought about. All put into perspective and reinforced in practice by Magidson’s lyrics…’ Enjoy yourself while you’re still in the pink’ and Elizabeth Taylor’s comment about ‘…falling off my pink cloud with a thud’.
Alison Medd is Director of Learning for Expressive Arts at a secondary school in Kent. Alison is new to the Gallery on the Green but has exhibited contemporary art at group shows with rhizoMAATic14 including – 288 NXRd, rhizoMAATic14 Graduate Show’(August 2014); 310 NXRd, ‘Say What?’ (March 2015); The Mali Salon, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rijeka, Croatia ‘Say What?’ (April 2015). ‘Message on a Bottle’ Ashcroft Arts Centre (May 2016); Utopia Volkspark Friedrichshain (August 2016) and the Islington Arts Factory Summer Show (August 2017).
Paul Rogers was Associate Head of the School of Art and Design and a principal lecturer in applied photography at Blackpool and the Fylde college. He has exhibited previously in the Gallery on the Green and in local and national venues in the UK and the USA.
Alison Medd and Paul Rogers
Here is a photograph of Alison and Paul at the opening of the exhibition together with an overview of the show and some of the images on show in the exhibition.
Overview
