CCA Gallery – Behind the Lens

Behind the lens was an expedition that focused on 1960s-70s Britain. This included pop culture, counter pop culture, sexual revolution and rock documentary. The expedition was by Mike McCartney, Rupert Truman and Carinthia West. The main focus of the gallery was on street photography style images were the subject didn’t know the image was going to be taken. The images captured the raw moments of music artists such as Paul McCartney working in there natural environment. The gallery also had images which were going to used as album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd.

Public and private – Pop Icons

Exhibiting artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Peter Blake, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, Eduardo Paolozzi, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones. The gallery focused on British and American Pop artists showing there work. Emerging in the mid 1950’s in Britain and late 1950’s in America, Pop Art reached its peak in the 1960’s and went on to become the most recognisable art form of the 20th century. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be.

Public and private – Being Human

The final exhibition we visited focused on female artwork. Being Human is an all-female art exhibition. The gallery holding the exhibition thought an all-female showcase needed to happen locally when they read the “Tate appears to have a 30% cap on the collection of female artists, with its allocation of annual budget is even worse, with as little as 13% spent on works by female artists in recent years.”

Blake was commissioned by Dodo Designs to produce an enamel plaque that was issued in an edition of 10,000 and sold for £1. Due to a fault in the enameling process the work was eventually screen printed onto tin. Babe Rainbow was a fictional lady wrestler, the reverse of the work featured her biography. This was favorite artwork from all three exhibitions as I thought it best depicted its chosen art style which in this case was pop art. The artwork reminds me somewhat of a poster the way there is central figure in the image and the bold text writing.