Friday 9 March 2012

The Endless Night. 35 years of nightclub portraits 1977- 2011

The Endless Night. 35 years of nightclub portraits 1977- 2011
An exhibition of Nightclub Photography by Derek Ridgers

Preview: Thursday 12th April – 6pm - 8pm
exhibition runs until the end of May. Open weekends 11am – 5pm. Free entry

Derek Ridgers is a professional photographer with 35 years work of experience working mainly for UK magazines and newspapers like NME, The Face, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, Time Out and Loaded. From 1978 onwards he has recorded the young inhabitants of London's streets and Soho's club scene. A record of a highly inventive through ultimately transient youth culture. He is also the author of 'When We Were Young, Club and Street Photography 1978 – 1987' A solo authored book with100 photographs. The Museum of Club Culture is pleased to be exhibiting a selection of his photography work.

Snap, Crackle and Neo Pop!

Snap, Crackle and Neo Pop!

An exhibition of paintings, prints and Russian Dolls by Mark Wigan
Preview opening - Saturday 24th March from 12 noon - 5pm
Open weekends 11 am - 5pm or during the week by appointment
Exhibition runs for 2 weeks.

Mark Wigan's work is anthropology a go-go, reportage, snatches of babble n chat and painstaking diagrams of classification. There is a commitment to spontaneity, intuition, the power of the imagination, graphic directness and the compulsion to draw. The paintings on exhibition feature motifs of masks, ciphers, biomorphs, wiggy antennae, boss eyes and hybrid creatures interlacing with teeming totemic schematized figures and electronic incubuses to form intricate technicolour maps, diagrams and patterns. The paintings, drawings and prints are both information and decoration, mapping out a hidden landscape and yielding secret signs. Archetypal and mythological sources arise from an intuitive journey into the collective unconscious and from observations and suffusion of mass media.

By embedding his personal, visual anthropology with meaningful associations with other pictorial languages he seeks active communication with his audience. Driven by the need to impose meaningful structure on the chaos of contemporary media overload Wigan seeks a TOTAL art. It is interesting that he is still making paintings out of a necessity to capture something more universal, more permanent. Wigan has produced a body of work that can be viewed as social and cultural hieroglyphics for our time, a visual anthem for the Twenty First century.