The Mostyn in Llandudno has just launched three new exhibitions: work by the celebrated British photographer Keith Arnatt, an interactive group exhibition and a new gallery initiative set up to nurture emerging artists.
Each exhibition has been curated by Adam Carr, Mostyn's visual arts programme curator. The group exhibition YOU includes work by five internationally acclaimed artists.
Adam told me that the whole thrust of YOU is as an exhibition which reacts to the audience so that each visitor experience will be unique.
The idea is that it places the viewer right at the centre of the exhibition, turning the traditional dynamic on its head, and signals the direction Adam hopes to take the Mostyn in throughout its programme until 2017.
Július Koller, Ping-Pong Club (U.F.O.), 1970-2007. Photo courtesy of Mostyn
It will feature an exhibit by the late Cuban-born sculptor Felix Gonzalez-Torres, someone Adam confesses is his favourite artist of all time. Untitled (Revenge) is a 325lb sculpture made of sweets which references the loss of Gonzalez-Torres' lover to Aids-related disease.
Each audience member is invited to take a sweet and eat it, thus rearranging the nature of the sprawling sculpture each time it interacts with a spectator.
Another piece, ..., comes from the acclaimed Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander. It involves a number of typewriters set up differently so that when visitors to the gallery tap away at the keys, what is produced on paper bears no resemblance to the letters they have pressed - instead showing a series of shapes, dashes and dots. The result is their own individualised drawing which they will be able to share on one of the gallery walls.
Rivane Neuenschwander, ..., 2005. Photo courtesy of Mostyn
The exhibition also includes Debuilding, a piece by the Dublin-based multi-disciplinary artist Aurélien Froment, which includes 3,000 wooden blocks of varying sizes which audiences can construct within the gallery space in any way they see fit.
Works by the Danish artist Jeppe Hein and the late Július Koller also feature.
Adam said: "Each exhibit creates a platform of possibility and will be changed in different ways by the activity of the person interacting with it.
"The piece by Gonzales-Torres is amazing because it gives life to his lover and of course himself after death. We will replenish the sweets if the supply is running low."
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Revenge), 1991. Photo courtesy of Mostyn
The School of Psychology at Bangor University has contributed to a display which accompanies the exhibition and features cultural artefacts, documents and other items showing the connection between physical objects and our cognition.
The idea is to place the artworks by the participating artists in a broader cultural and contextual field.
Professor Guillame Thierry from the department said: "The exhibition at Mostyn breaks new ground.
"People often conceive the experience of art as passive but this is incorrect, for our brain interprets the world, all the time. Our mind constructs reality and the experience of beauty. The exhibition YOU makes this link tangible."
Running concurrently to YOU will be a display of photography by Keith Arnatt, one of the leading conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, whose work has been shown at Mostyn before.
Keith Arnatt, Boxes, 1995 © Keith Arnatt Estate. Courtesy of Maureen Paley
It ties in nicely with YOU because the work exhibited is concerned with an examination of the object of art, the role of the artist and the artist as subject and is constantly questioning the viewer’s position in relation to what they are seeing.
Adam said: "It corresponds to the theme of YOU but it also pushes the idea in a different direction.
"Keith Arnatt was very fond of Wales, he was a teacher in Newport and spent his later life here and focused very much on the mundane aspects of everyday life."
Works on show at the Mostyn include an intimate snapshot of Arnatt's domestic life, Notes to Jo, which is photographs of a series of sticky notes that the couple wrote to one another during their life together, as well as photographs of a series of boxes he has collected on his travels.
Meanwhile on the upper level of the Mostyn will be the new Gallery 6 scheme, dedicated to holding début exhibitions for artists who have not yet shown their work in solo exhibitions.
Among those lined up to exhibit as part of the Uprisings series is Becca Voelcker, originally from Gwynedd, and Laura Reeves who lives and works in Swansea, but the season kicks off with work by Alek O from Buenos Aires.
Alek O, Ayrton Senna, 2010, embroidery on canvas. Photo by Alex Howe
It will feature a collection of tiles as a backdrop to a piece called Tangram which involves umbrellas she has found and shaped to look like different animals.
The Alek O exhibition runs until 14 July, while YOU and the Keith Arnatt exhibitions run until 7 July. For more details visit the Mostyn website.
