Interest area: Photography

Open Eye Gallery is proud to present an annual exhibition of new talent graduating from BA Photography and Social Practice (UCEN Manchester) and BA in Digital Imaging and Photography (Hugh Baird College).

From the intimacy of personal relationships to the ways of navigating the perils and sharing our visual culture, these diverse projects illuminate how we can connect and support each other. The exhibition offers a nuanced exploration of the many ways in which relationships are formed, nurtured, and expressed.

Bonds / Hugh Baird College

Each year, Open Eye Gallery works with photography students from Hugh Baird College, giving guidance and feedback on their projects. The works making up the Bonds exhibition delve into the intricacy of shared experiences and perspectives. Each artist carefully explores connections with others, studying the ways they can be manifested or how new ones can be forged.

Works by: Billie Bowden, Jennifer Murray, Abby Ready, Joseph Smith, Courtney Smith, Valentin Todorean,, Michelle Webster.

Ripples / UCEN Manchester

Photography and Social Practice course is delivered by UCEN Manchester and Open Eye Gallery. This year UCEN students are presenting two projects. Dear Dad by Molly Wright is sharing the artist’s personal journey of grief through the form of photography and the astonishing impact that a place can have on memory. Movie Love by Aurelia Mermier invites the viewers to read through exchanged notes, memorabilia, and collaborative experimental photography of the two people in a relationship that has changed their lives deeply.

Works by: Molly Wright and Aurelia Mermier.

Sarah Fisher, Executive Director at Open Eye Gallery, said: Open Eye Gallery is interested in developing career opportunities for photographers from diverse backgrounds and bringing forward the individual voices of the next generation of artists. That’s the focus of these courses and this show. Both exhibitions have been through the process of thinking about what the students want to say as photographers. They are treated exactly the same as we would treat any international artist: it’s not about where they are in their careers, it’s about these individual voices and the stories they tell.

This exhibition is a continued celebration of Open Eye Gallery’s ongoing relationship with Hugh Baird College and UCEN Manchester. They are delighted to be supporting new photographic talent at the beginning of their artistic careers.

‘I became a mother’ is a personal journey into a universal female experience of metamorphosis, evolution, and recovery.

Photographing her daughter became the only opportunity for a creative output after Poiša became a parent in early 2022. These photographs transcended the immediate function of the family album revealing lesser-known sides of mothering.

This work reconsiders the conventional representation the mother, reframing birth, and motherhood as a journey down the mythical well as part of a feminine initiation.

Saturday Town is a photography series by the award-winning photographer Casey Orr. Since 2013 Casey has travelled throughout the UK with her pop-up portrait studio photographing young people on Saturday afternoons. The project explores fashion, identity and the self-expression of young people on Saturday afternoons on the high streets and public spaces of towns across the country.

This is the largest show of Saturday Town and Casey Orr’s first retrospective show.

Bronwyn Andrews, exhibition assistant curator and creative producer at Open Eye Gallery, said: “Are we different now? How do you picture yourself? How does it feel to belong, or rebel? What makes you feel like you?

Saturday Town acts as a mosaic of youth subculture, fashion-dialects and self expression in the north of England over the last 11 years. Through a tumultuous period which has seen a global pandemic, the dissolution of the gender binary and the death of the highstreet, Casey Orr holds up a sign which reads ‘These young people are important!’

Open Eye Gallery are thrilled to host Casey Orr’s first retrospective and platform the unique fashion and visual language of the north, highlighting young people’s identities and style as culturally significant. We are delighted to facilitate conversations around belonging, identity, community and self representation through this work.

Casey Orr, photographer, said: “The project acts as a witness to young lives. Taking these photographs continues to excite me as it evolves and refers to the times in which we live, as well as a shared past that is reinvented and flows through new generations. Fashion and bodily self-expression are important and powerful tools for us all, to state who we are beyond consumerism and capitalism; beyond selfies and social media platforms”.

Saturday Town started in 2013 as Saturday Girl, when Casey Orr started photographing young women in Leeds on Saturday afternoons and exploring what it meant in terms of culture, tribe identities and values and how these things burst forth in the unspoken language of fashion and bodily self-expression.

After that Casey took the studio on the road throughout the UK, visiting over 20 cities and photographing over 800 people. Casey said, “Liverpool women just blew me away with their style. The Liverpool aesthetic of wearing curlers in your hair whilst out shopping on a Saturday afternoon is just so playful and expressive, saying to the world: “I’m going out tonight!”

Saturday Girl turned into Saturday Town, as the project has developed into a space for all gender expressions. The portraits aren’t styled beyond personal decisions made in front of bedroom mirrors. These images are a document of culture, read through fashion.

Saturday afternoons are spaces of freedom – from school, family and institutions. Saturdays are often a time when groups of young friends gather together in city centres and high streets to shop and hang out, to look and be seen.

They invite you to the exhibition where every day is Saturday.

Liverpool based Photographer, Greg Hodge will be exhibiting some of his work in 92 Degrees Jamaica Street entitled ‘A Look Back’ from 01/02/24 until 29/02/24.

There will be a variety of work exhibited, taken over the course of 5 years, representing the artists focus on capturing ‘moments’ within everyday life with themes of nostalgia & time running throughout.

There will be an opening night on 01/02/24 from 6:30pm until 9pm at the venue.