Today I visited the Manchester Open exhibition at HOME. There was a lot of work on display, mainly figurative paintings, drawings and photography. There was a superb motorway bridge painting by Jen Orpin and an excellent portrait by Xhi Ndubisi. There was a Manchester flavour to a lot of the work, familiar streets and buildings, references to factory records etc. It reminded me of Rob's comments about not being too mancunian.
Craft was under represented, and some of the work in this area was of poor quality. The ceramics were a bit boring. There was a coat with text and images, made as part of a community project that was interesting, but otherwise textiles were not very exciting. It was a shame that there wasn't more variety, but painting was by far the most frequently chosen medium.
Later in the day I visited the Castlefield Gallery for a curators tour of the archive exhibition, with Thomas Dukes and Matthew Pendergast. There was a wide variety of work on display. I liked the installation by Kelly Jayne Jones, incorporating sound and video.
There was an interesting discussion after the tour. The discussion touched on who keeps records of the past, and how the records may contain omissions and mistakes. This struck a chord with me in terms of inaccuracies or omissions in my own family history.
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