SLIDE/TAPE: Carousel Residency
at Library of Birmingham
Artist Cathy Wade invited the public to join her during her residency in The Pavilion, at the extraordinary new Library of Birmingham as part of the four month Discovery Season curated by Capsule.
CAROUSEL was a unique opportunity to experience making a collective art work with the original slide format. Virtually a lost medium, there is an alchemical magic to the processing of film into a slide transparency. Cathy worked with the public to bring back to light forgotten memories that have been languishing in shoe boxes and attics in order to create a collective experience, through the carousel projector.
A slide carousel projection is image, light, text, repetition and sound; it is a medium open to reworking, re-photographing splicing and drawing onto. The slide carousel allows for multiple ownerships, formal and informal to be interwoven with references to diverse subjects such as lecture packs, archive documentation, drawings and text to be re-photographed, reworked and re-shown.
CAROUSEL was a mission to cross reference, contrast, rework and revise, making a space that celebrated the new forms that can be made from existing images. CAROUSEL connected directly with our childhoods, with family histories and collective nostalgia. In our digital environment, where many young people can now be described as ‘digital natives’ there is a burgeoning nostalgia and creative interest in analogue, historical technologies. In relation to phone Apps that consciously reference the slide aesthetic, we could call this the ‘Instagram’ effect.
We hope CAROUSEL opened up the creative potential of the slide to a wide audience, balancing personal experience with the institutional, resulting in a live work that was consistently revised, reworked and developed with participants throughout the residencies duration.
Cathy Wade is an interdisciplinary artist who works through collaboration, curation and research. She has exhibited extensively in both the UK and internationally working with galleries and projects including Vertigo Gallery, VIVID, Toomey Tourell Gallery, Curfew Tower, Newlyn Art Gallery, Capsule, EC Arts, and Clarke Gallery. She is currently Research Director at Edible Eastside and Curator at A3 Project Space.
