ArtHouse Jersey and Art for Guernsey are hosting their first partnership exhibition, The Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show. This diverse exhibition features 19 carefully selected artists and was drawn from an open call to Channel Islands and international artists last year. It is produced & curated by ArtHouse Jersey and Art for Guernsey, in association with Les Champs Libres in Rennes. The work will be first showcased at ArtHouse Jersey at Capital House followed by a month-long exhibition at Art for Guernsey in St Peter Port opening on Thursday 7 March 2024. Five artists are from Guernsey, seven from Jersey and seven from other countries around the world, including Germany, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Switzerland and Russia.
For the inaugural Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show exhibition opening in Jersey audiences can expect a show that brings to life the curatorial ‘anchor point’ which is the inspiration the Channel Islands have offered to artists through history, particularly from the late 19th century to mid 20th century, as well as reflecting the more complex social realities of the Islands today. It will also explore how both these realities continue to shape the Channel Islands’ relation to the wider world.
With stunning landscape and portrait photography, exquisite and subtly layered painted works alongside sculptural and video pieces, it will both question and invite the viewer to reflect on themselves and the complex global histories of these Islands. The show promises to be mysterious and experiential for the visitor, with shifting and changing perspectives, much like the Islands themselves when seen from close-up and afar, as visitors walk through the gallery environment.
Within the photography of Paul Chambers there exists an urgency to capture those who have a continue to be overlooked. This desire to expand our filed of vision materialises here through a social realist lens.
The portraits within Chambers’ series, captured via the process of wet plate collodion from the 19th century, take inspiration from Irving Penn’s 1948 series: Corner Portraits. Penn famously positioned his subjects in small corner spaces, as to limit their range of movement and produce a visual language through which to represent the ongoing social turbulence in America.
Transporting this concept from mid-century America to present-day Guernsey, Chambers’ subjects are also placed in confined spaces, principally in locations across the island renowned for their social and historical significance.
In capturing the portraits of those marginalised by our society, Chambers provides a metaphor for personal and collective struggles. Furthermore, in juxtaposing the subject and location, he produces a powerful record of that which is visible and cared for in contrast to those that are rendered peripheral.
Whilst Chambers’ work does not relieve his subjects of the forces that marginalise them, it does confront its audience with a compelling hypothesis: that the persistent proximity of the Channel Islands to the virtues of beauty overdetermine its self-perception and, in turn, its (in)ability to respond to the social realities of island life.
John
My struggle with mental illness into the light.
Seems like no words can express what I've been through.
If anyone wants to know more they can get in touch or come to the viewing and hopefully meet me in person.
Sofi
Born from a stranger, many countries lived yearning to belong, searching to find a place to call a home, where the piece of the puzzle fits …
Hope brought me here standing feeling raindrops on my face, looking to the sky for blue on the horizon
Hope brings community of misfits and mischiefs to find a better tomorrow, to weather the darkest storm .. together
Alex
The figure in this photo is ugly. And that figure is me.
My tortured flesh is bumpy, and broad, reflecting an androgyny which will never fully leave me, regardless of the steps I have taken to align my body with my gender.
I resent this photo for showing up my vanity, but I nevertheless stand in awe of its poetry; the way the austere and dilapidated fencing emerges from the ground and weaves around my body like vines echoes my lifelong struggle against the sex caste which nature assigned to me by nature. I straddle it in my desire to triumph above my biological destiny, but inevitably I face compromise. I am caught in the middle, stubbornly hermaphroditic.
The photo is haunting to me, but it is also beautiful.
Paul
The emptiness and loneliness of poverty: That place where the seed of choice is stolen/taken from us. Most days, we wake and we dwell in possibility, a place where we are free to make choices for ourselves and those we love.
A few years back it wasn’t the case for me and my family, and still for too many here who live in the fear we did 5 years ago. I’d lost my job and suddenly we were 30k worse a year, it happened in the blink of an eye.
The biggest worry for us was the bank and landlord, our bills and direct debits not going through; we didn’t have enough coming in to meet what was going out. We lived in fear of letters coming through the door, and text messages from those we owed. It was like living in a prison without walls. We were so very close to losing everything.
Jamie
Writing this short paragraph is all the harder as taking the photo, but as I look at it now, I think it captures something special. From the vague look of dejection on my face (something I experience daily—what else am I to do all day but to reflect on my situation), to my partially withered arm, to my withered legs (both of which I’m very disappointed that Paul caught by the way! but nah, it’s all good). And the photo is good, too.
Private View at Art for Guernsey, captured by JR Photography
