Art for the masses

This must be the busiest private view I have been to in a while. Camberwell College is fam­ous for these nights, hav­ing the show for every single pop­u­lar course in the col­lege. Now, Camberwell is def­in­itely the most ‘con­cep­tual’ of the University of the Arts col­leges. Even the Graphics path­ways tend to be more on the abstract side. Also, I’ve prob­ably never seen a BA Drawing exhib­i­tion with no draw­ings whatsoever.

I star­ted with Graphic Design. There were some visu­ally pleas­ing pro­jects, which imme­di­ately caught my eye. From pretty draw­ings dis­play­ing a high level of skills to immacu­late inform­a­tion graph­ics, it looked prom­ising.

As I am any­thing but a fan of tri­angles (so 2010) I was amused to see the only piece at the back of the room fea­tur­ing an impend­ing yel­low tri­angle of doom.

For the rest, the path­way boas­ted a large array of nicely bound books and laser­cut objects. Sadly, concept wasn’t always explained and some pieces looked like they were simply left there (like two quite beau­ti­ful etch­ings depict­ing digital shapes just rest­ing against the wall on top of a tiny ledge). The print­mak­ing depart­ment also hos­ted all the recent work done in the stu­dio. I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly impressed as most pieces shown there we simply ‘safe’ visual options without that much exper­i­ment­ing. One piece stood out merely due to the tech­nique used and its shear size. I do also love CMYK dots.

Next was illus­tra­tion. I am always scep­tical about illus­tra­tion at Camberwell because the work and its qual­ity var­ies so much. Some pieces really worked, both con­cep­tu­ally and aes­thet­ic­ally.

Ranging from a crazy space-​room to tech­nic­ally impress­ive draw­ings, the show was over­all show­cas­ing inter­est­ing pro­jects.

Sadly, cer­tain pieces simply did not look like some­thing you would like to hand in as a final pro­ject. I only man­aged a quick look at Painting and Drawing, because the show was clos­ing down and people were mov­ing on to the Hermit’s Cave down near Camberwell Green.

The fine art ele­ment of these path­ways was not too arrog­ant and explan­a­tions were provided, allow­ing the viewer to actu­ally inter­act with the work (con­trary to the Goldsmith’s exhib­i­tion in the Church I wrote about earlier this week).

As always though, some pieces were simply way out of my league.

I would like to apo­lo­gise for not includ­ing any links in this art­icle. There were very few busi­ness cards lying about and because of the crowd I did not man­age to write down names…

About author:

Nathan Gotlib
Nathan's work tends to be about information and the way it is spread. His enthusiasm and love for neon signage stems from this interest. A subject he continually tries to explore is how people react to experiencing certain bits of information and the psychological effect it has on them. This goes hand in hand with his practice of Design, a discipli... Read further >