Today's idea - Martha Rosler Reads Vogue Exhibiton

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.

Today's idea - The Transmission Exhibition at the Grey Area

Today, and every day that is a Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday sees Transmission, a lovely exhibition run until January the 31st.

In clever and artsier words than I have to hand (normal service will resume next week) The Grey Area, where it's hosted says the below about Transmission. If you want an abbreviation, this is it: "experimental contemporary art events in an idiosyncratic non-sterile project space." Yes, well. It's free, and good for a nose around to expand one's feeling of atryness. Open 1-5pm, add yourself to the Facebook event and you can find it here on Google Maps.

"TRANSMISSION brings together four artists using different media and approaches, who each share a particular interest in communication as dialogue and interpretation.

Whether it is the interpretation of one’s words, the translation of a text, or a reading and understanding of the world; the dynamics between intention and result and between transmission and reception are significant in the artists’ investigations of communication.

The artists’ common ground is an interest in what’s hidden behind the immediacy of signs. What is beyond our grasp and understanding: meaning. To be universally understood meaning has to be common and uniformed; it requires a conventional acceptance.

The critique of this common meaning that we could call “truth” is carried out by the artists in different ways. Their differences are as important as their similarities.

Their differences show the rhizomatic nature of the truth - of each truth.TRANSMISSION means then a creative process of interpretation rather than an assimilation of unified information. It is the capability to create personal meanings and understandings.

By playing with the visibility of the sign and the invisibility of significance, art can expose our fragile being and the tragicomic failure of the search for a higher and universal truth."