Vault: 7th Annual UCL Art Museum/Slade Collaboration, featuring work by David Blackmore, Kara Chin and Naomi Fitzsimmons is showing at UCL Art Museum from 26 September - 16 December 2016.

This exhibition and series of public events is the 7th annual invitation to students at the Slade School of Art to delve into UCL’s art collections and to create new works in response. For the first time this year, it is based on a longer residency format. This allowed for more intensive research, with artists discovering many hidden treasures, to produce individual, contemporary works in a range of media, including installation, performance and painting.

Working with the medium of performance, Naomi Fitzsimmons revisits BLAST, a literary magazine produced to promote Vorticism, a modernist art movement headed by Wyndham Lewis. Blast / Bless expands the archive’s boundaries and meanings by engaging with them in the present with the theatricality of the live format. The work explores techniques utilized to seduce viewers, and how relevance today within and for systems of power. Kara Chin has produced paintings with kinetic elements calling attention to the unseen, as embodied by the very nature of the museum’s stored collection. David Blackmore’s research into Countess Markievicz, a former Slade student who was an Irish militant revolutionary, politician and suffragette, also engages with the unseen by making her conspicuous absence at UCL visible via his sculptural intervention and bespoke archive that will inhabit UCL Art Museum, UCL’s main library and the Slade’s Material Museum.

So many fascinating discoveries were made during the residency that the exhibition includes a special display box dedicated to rarely seen material From the Vault. It will feature a bi-weekly rotation of displays selected by guest curators.

UCL Art Museum, South Cloisters, University College London, London WC1E 6BT
open Monday - Friday 1 - 5pm

For more information see: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2016/09/27/unlocking-the-museums-vaults/