Gee Vaucher: An Introspective
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 24
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Firstsite, Colchester (UK)
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- November
- Year of first exhibition
- 2016
- URL
-
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=803
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Gee Vaucher is best known for her involvement with the punk band Crass (1977–84), for which she designed materials such as record sleeves, flyers, videos and collages that the band used during live performances. Far less known, however, is Vaucher’s wider body of work, which has spanned over four decades and includes collage, photography, painting, sculpture, film, performance, typography, sound and installation.
Gee Vaucher: Introspective traced the artist’s work from the 1960s onwards across this full range of media. It placed particular emphasis on exploring Vaucher’s overlooked or underappreciated contributions to the history of visual culture, such as her engagement with politics and punk’s largely ignored relationship with Surrealism and Fluxus. The exhibition’s co-curators worked closely with the artist and conducted research on materials from Vaucher’s personal archives, which featured heavily among the show’s roughly 230 objects. The exhibition also carefully contextualised the works by Vaucher on display: for example, by pairing her Knots series with original books by Max Ernst, who informed Vaucher’s working methods and the resulting form of this series, the artist’s book.
While the exhibition presented some of the artist’s most iconic objects, such as her record covers from the 1980s, it also featured an abundance of materials never previously displayed in public, such as footage from performances with the avant-garde group EXIT, which helped cast a spotlight on Colchester’s vibrant performance scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, the exhibition offered one of the most complete presentations to-date of Vaucher’s serial works, such as her series of paintings Children (who have seen too much too soon). The exhibition’s 140-page, richly illustrated catalogue, for which Shukaitis assumed primary responsibility, further provided one of the few art historical resources about Vaucher, with a range of essays about different aspects of her practice.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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