Bread & Roses

Alex Hardy

Abbi Torrance: Formation 3

Rebecca Harris

Paul R Jones

Mark McGowan, 

aka The Artist Taxi Driver

James William Murray

Alex Pearl

Kate Pickering

Abbi Torrance

Tumim & Prendergast

Hanae Utamura

Rich White

Curated by  
Julie McCalden

 

Friday 1^st June

Preview:  6pm – late

Saturday 2^nd June

Group critique: 2pm

Exhibition continues: 

Saturday 2^nd – Sunday 3^rd June, 12-6pm

Art, as a shifter of perceptions, is a terrain which can change how we think about ourselves and the world. As such, it is a potential catalyst for producing social change. An encounter with artwork that is unusual, surprising or delivered in atypical ways can disrupt our customary behaviours, allowing us to see and think differently. Bread & Roses attempts to operate in this arena, opening up a space in which something new can take place. The works have been chosen for this catalytic potentiality, however unquantifiable. In accepting this immeasurability, the project remains about possibility.

Many of the works share a subtle political undercurrent, underlying the desire to see the world differently in order to change it. 

 

The show takes its name from a poem penned in 1911 by James Oppenheim, but commonly attributed to a Massachusetts textile strike in 1912 where it was used as a slogan by the women strikers – we want bread but we want roses too. In a world characterised by a sense of inevitability, this exhibition seeks to unravel common sense notions to reveal other possibilities beyond the limits of our imagination.



Part of the Bristol Biennial Community Arts Festival