Today and until April 4th, the
Grey Area plays host to 'Martha Rosler reads Vogue' from Alison Jones, Martha Rosler, and Milly Thompson. A thoroughly nice little arty spot in brighton, the installation:
"will consider the luxury magazine and the complex veils through which the amorous glances of commodities charm and fascinate with their illusions:
Identification, aspiration, wealth, social superiority, luxury, distinction, class appreciation of the finer things in life, are imbricated in an orgy of bourgeois values; the enduring symptom of women’s asymmetric relation to power insistently realised through the private world as to-be-looked-at-ness and being-for-others; the elliptic worlds of fashion, art, media, entertainment and the nexus of money; and the co-dependency of the artist producing recondite commodities which furnish glamorous lifestyles within this realm.
Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (Martha Rosler 1982) deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. It was created at the time of the first backlash of post-feminism and the values she interrogated then are now ubiquitous, making the questions Rosler raises prescient.
Alison Jones foregrounds the contradictions of post-feminism and power in ink drawings that feature magazine photographs of women collectors at home with their private art collections of Helmut Newton and Thomas Ruff.
Milly Thompson’s graphic digital prints are aestheticised utterances that play on the subliminal messages of contemporary aspiration and desire through the language of advertising."
There. Arty blurb better than I could ever put it. Finding the Grey Area is a tad like Harry Potter's Diagon Alley (look around the corner) but it's a good little spot.
Open Thursday-Sundays, 1-5pm.
