The Gathering

The Gathering is the exhibition currently held at the Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The Gathering is the result of the first curatorial competition for post-graduates held by the Arts Council back in 2008. The winner, Robert Dingle, focussed the exhibition on how key pieces have been collected by the Arts Council Commission over the last forty years, an interesting view of how and why these pieces are being exhibited and their historical significance.


Two key pieces for me stood alone. The first is a Video by Mark Wallinger, Angel, 1997, part of the Talking in Tongues trilogy. The seven and a half minute video portrays Wallinger as his blind alter ego, walking on the spot at the base of Angel tube station, London, his stick tapping across him rhythmically. This is the first time that I have seen this piece and there is something subtly uncanny about the whole piece. The other commuters as they travel along the other escalators seem to be walking in the wrong direction and Wallingers speech, an excerpt of St Johns Gospel, has a disjointed quality. In actuality Wallinger learnt the entire passage backwards which was then edited and the film is seen in reverse. At the end Wallinger ascends the escalator to the sound of Zadok The Priest. The whole piece is very witty with a dry humour and the overblown theatricality of the ending is the perfect crescendo. This piece obviously deals with issues surrounding religion and the symbolism is plane to see; the all seeing blind man, the divine placed in context of the mundane, his ascension to heaven and the way the contradictions in how it was filmed and then shown supposedly reflects contradictions Wallinger sees in the Christian faith.

The other piece that caught my attention was Corona, 1970, by Peter Sedgley. A member of the Op Art movement Sedgley's Corona is a painting approx. two metres by two metres of concentric, boldly coloured circles which blend and meld into each other beautifully. It is a quite simple design which could quite easily be taken as just that and overlooked but deserves a lot more time and attention. As you stand in front of the painting the circles begin to oscillate and move until suddenly, in the blink of an eye, one of the rings will change colour. This piece has mastered subtlety, balancing on the edge between noticeable but not obvious, like when a light flickers so momentarily that you are left unsure whether it was just your eyes. It is through a combination of coloured kinetic lights directed onto the painting that these changes occur and when you look from light to canvas you can dissimilate how it is done. However even when you knew the workings of the illusion, when you looked back form across the room all you see is a static painting, the only clue to the illusion is others visitors reaction.