“This exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver.” Stephen Clarke rides shotgun through Tate Liverpool’s Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha… 

The text-based artwork, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS (1976), acts as the frontispiece to Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha at RIBA North. The exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver and his artist books acting as our guide. Our first stop is the seminal publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). This small book contains photographs taken by Ruscha along the highway, Route 66, between Los Angeles and Oklahoma. On a touch screen monitor next to its display case the viewer can leaf through a digital copy; and see other complete copies of seven of Ruscha’s classic books. These selected publications provide our itinerary, each one focusing attention upon the built environment – a suitable subject for a gallery at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Tanked up on gasoline, we are on the move. Our route is punctuated by text-based artworks. The large letters OK (1990) suggest that it is okay to continue our journey and, perhaps, reference Oklahoma as OK is the state’s abbreviated form as it would appear on a vehicle licence plate. It is worthwhile noting that Ruscha is an ‘Okie’ – a migrant to Los Angeles who has had to learn how to read this city. Our next guidebook is Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion-format book that unfolds to nearly twenty-five feet in length. We literally have to travel along this continuous image – the viewers’ eyes in motion as the book is read. In the gallery, six photographic prints represent the Strip. On the negatives for the prints Ruscha has applied a razor blade and sandpaper to distress each picture. The result is that we become aware of the artist’s hand that disrupts our view through the car window.

The next punctuation point is another text-based piece, DANCE? (1973). This piece uses foodstuffs – coffee, egg white, mustard, chilli sauce, ketchup and cheddar cheese – to produce the letters that stain the canvas. DANCE? functions as a juncture between the diners and nightclubs pictured in the photographs of the Strip and invites the sort of physical activity that could take place in the next series of photographs of swimming pools from the artist book Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). These pools seem to be the communal spaces of apartment complexes or, more likely, roadside motels. Motion is arrested as the still, uninviting pools wait for guests to arrive. Around the corner are photographs from Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967). It is a fanciful leap to consider drivers parking up to take advantage of the empty pools; however, both sets of work await intervention. The question function of Dance? becomes ‘Park?’ and ‘Swim?’

America, Her Best Product (1974) is the next punctuation and effectively introduces artworks that reference street maps. A set of aerial photographs of parking lots taken from a helicopter gives us the bird’s eye view or downward gaze that is the vantage point of the following painting and etchings. The painting BLVD. – AVE. – ST (2006), is dissected by thick pale bands across a light grey speckled ground which connotes the surface of the Los Angeles roads. The harshness of sunlight is apparent in the grey tones whilst a band of bright orange at the top of the canvas adds to the feeling of heat. This painting is supported by a group of small, coloured etchings that are comprised of lines and street names – reinforcing the reference to map reading. It is at this point in our journey that we move on to higher ground.

Snow-capped mountains that seemingly have no place in the hot desert of southern California are the background for two large paintings. These are overlaid with text: one reads DAILY PLANET (2002), while the other promises Pay Nothing Until April (2003). Are these billboard adverts that we drive past? A strong connection is made to the movie industry since The Daily Planet is the workplace of Clark Kent, and the snow-capped mountain is the logo for Paramount Pictures. At the close of this section the piece Miracle #64 (1975) depicts a strong shaft of light shining from the top left corner that cuts through the darkness of the background. It is often interpreted as a depiction of light emanating from a film projector, or alternatively a heavenly intervention; it could be seen more prosaically as the overhead light from a streetlamp.

The penultimate punctuation point is the word painting HONK (1962). Situated high on the wall, thus disrupting the flow, the piece breaks the silence of Miracle #64. At the close of this exhibition, references to the film industry take centre stage as the text pieces MAD SCIENTIST (1975) and HOLLYWOOD TANTRUM (1979) connote cinematic drama. Perhaps, the fate of the screenwriter was enacted by the minor drama of Royal Road Test (1967) – on display as a digital book – that documented Ruscha dropping a vintage typewriter from a speeding Buick. Did Ruscha take on the role of the scientist undertaking a mad experiment or was the typewriter thrown through the window as an act of aggression?

The exhibition closes with a final text-based artwork. THE END #40 (2003), is a depiction of the last few seconds of a movie, caught between frames. The two words, ‘The End’, are cut along the horizontal plane and so simulate the motion of the film. The dynamic of this exhibition has been the viewer moving through the landscape of southern California; however, the main concern has been the relationship between Ruscha’s books with his paintings, prints and photographs. The centrality of his publications is evident: it is clearly affirmed that Ruscha is the artist that does books.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha continues @ Tate Liverpool until 14 June

Images: Edward Ruscha, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS 1976; Ed Ruscha, OK (State I) 1990. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Ed Ruscha; Edward Ruscha, DAILY PLANET 2003 &PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL 2003

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Exhibitions Continue: @ The Atkinson, Southport – FREE

A trio of shows currently grace Southport’s Atkinson. The Magic of Middle-earth, brings together all manner of creative responses to Tolkien’s opus, including memorabilia, paintings, sculptures, and Lego. Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s I Love You Southport finds the Sefton-born artist showcasing new works; and the gallery’s collection marks its 150th anniversary with a new display bringing together works from the 17th century to the present day. Something for everyone.

From the Archive: Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Merseyside Burman Empire

Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial continues across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening days/times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial: BEDROCK Review

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the well-established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as ever. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations across Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley and St. Helens, it boasts 22 new commissions of its 64 exhibiting artists. From degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack, there’s much to look forward to from this year’s showcase of grassroots art and artists. Check individual venues for opening days/times.

Tuesday – Exhibition Continues: Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? @ Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno – FREE

This major exhibition, commissioned by The National Gallery, takes as its inspiration the hiding of works of art for safekeeping during the Second World War in a disused Snowdonia slate mine. Featuring works and co-curated by Turner Prize-winning artist, Jeremy Deller, Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? also includes new commissions by early career Welsh artists, Esyllt Angharad Lewis, Gweni Llwyd, Lewis Prosser, Llyr Evans and Sadia Pineda Hameed.

News From Home 5.50pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

When Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was voted Sight & Sound magazine’s greatest film in its 2022 poll, it marked a major shake-up for not just the poll, but also those names synonymous with the award. A welcome turn of events, it opens the door to programming that brings audiences into contact with a, perhaps, less familiar name. Such is the case with this week’s screening of News From Home, Akerman’s avant-garde documentary, which finds the director ‘exiled’ in New York, reading letters sent to her from her mum back in Europe.

Wednesday – Shallow Grave 8pm (and 5.45pm Thursday) @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

A trio of flatmates (baby Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston) come into an unexpected windfall in director Danny Boyle’s 1994 debut Shallow Grave – and come face to face with the consequences of greed and betrayal.

Thursday – Opening: Manchester International Festival 2025: Dream Differently  @ Aviva Studios/Venues across the city – £Various

Framed this year as a ‘leap into the unknown’, 2025′s MIF is, nevertheless, the usual reliable mix of family friendly and aficionado-centred visual art, performance, spectacle, music and more. Everyone will be talking about Eric Cantona, whose artistic collaboration with Ryan Gander features in the huge group exhibition, Football City, Art United. Our highlights include contemporary ballet reimagining Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (starring John Grant and Ed Watson); and the first international solo exhibition of indigenous northern Peruvian artist and activist, Santiago Yahuarcani, whose narrative paintings are “rooted in the legacy of my ancestors, those who saw the universe not as something to conquer, but to revere.”

Liverpool Biennial 2025: Drop-in Weekly Tea and Talk Tours 2pm 20 Jordan Street – FREE

This does what it says on the tin tour offers a way to ease yourself in to the Biennial if all those sites, artists and the theme itself prove a bit overwhelming – it can be a lot to take in. If our experience of this edition’s Biennial volunteers is anything to go by, you’ll be in safe, informative, hands.

Moolakii Club: Silent Film Soundtracks 7pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £7

Obscure, avant-garde early silent and experimental film set to contemporary electronica. A compelling proposition.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Hollywood, New York, Colwyn Bay @ Oriel Colwyn, Colwyn Bay – FREE

Championing photography in Wales since 2012, Oriel Colwyn’s latest opening, from sometime Tatler photographer Dafydd Jones, coincides with American Independence Day. Working in the US with the likes of Vanity Fair, Jones captured the best – and worst –  of US society, from Hollywood to Wall Street and beyond. Catch Jones in conversation at the gallery on Saturday @ 1pm.

More photography from the Big Apple

Saturday – Apocalypse Now: Final Cut 12.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, now has a Final Cut – restored from the original negative by the man himself. Coppola’s preferred version of his Vietnam War epic, this edit pushes its run-time over the three-hour mark and can be considered definitive. Want to make a day of it? Documentary Hearts of Darkness, chronicling Coppola’s on-set travails, follows at 4.30pm.

Sunday – The Piano Teacher 4.15pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Even if you’re somewhat familiar with the challenging, mercurial oeuvre of Austrian director, Michael Haneke, his 2001 film, The Piano Teacher, could well catch you unawares. Adapted from Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 psychosexual novel of the same name, it stars Isabelle Huppert as the repressed, hemmed in music professor of the title. A brutal, fascinating, and ultimately destructive character study of a woman pushing for sexual agency.

Mike Pinnington/Laura Robertson

Images from top: Football City, Art United. MIF25. Matt Fox, The Magic Of Middle-earth 2025, The Atkinson, photo by Dave Jones. Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? at Mostyn Gallery. Ewan McGregor, in director Danny Boyle’s 1994 debut Shallow Grave (still). Dachshunds fighting over doggy canapés. Iris Love (holding Just Desserts) and Brooke Astor (holding Dolly Astor) at a dachshund party, Barbetta restaurant. Manhattan, 12 February 1990: Dafydd Jones, Hollywood, New York, Colwyn Bay exhibition, Oriel Colwyn 2025

Askance tales of a storied city, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Stephen Clarke’s record of a “brief moment” that nevertheless offers up a multi-lens cultural reckoning…

It’s the city that never sleeps; the place where you can take a walk on the wild side.

One of the world’s most filmed cities, it has been endlessly mediated; through cinema, but also song, TV, theatre, art and more. We all think we know it, can picture it, hear it, even; and can imagine scenes playing out on its streets (that aren’t, funnily enough, paved with gold), in loft apartments, and atop eminently recognisable buildings.

When a nameless, almost silhouette of a figure waves down a taxi-cab, just out of shot, you think you hear a strangled, exasperated: “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin here!” Meanwhile, shuttered shop-fronts jostle, incongruously, with huge, aspirational billboard ads for DKNY: star of this particular scene the Statue of Liberty might be, but grime and grit is rarely too far from view.

Rooftops. They hum with and foreshadow the still to come parkour-style police chases, in which a crook thumbs his nose at authority, screaming “made it ma! Top of the world!”, only seconds later to trip on his own hubris, falling, so that he clings on by his fingernails to the building’s edge, before plunging to his death.

At the end of the block, nestled alongside those trademark yellow taxi-cabs, we can take our pick of fast-food from Pizza, Big Wok, and Khyber Kabab. This, after all, is the city home to the most languages spoken per head of population anywhere in the world – New York was, and continues to be, built on immigration.

Landing on another image from Stephen Clarke’s New York 1995–1996 (a new photobook from the prolific Café Royal Books), we’re confronted with a haunting by architecture, in the shape of the Twin Towers of One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center. They’re not front and centre, however, as many a photographer would choose to stage a picture of them. Instead, shot from (presumably) across the Hudson River, they somehow loiter in the background, uncertain. Knowing what we know today, they have acquired a ghostly, not quite present, transparent quality.

The Empire State Building is given similar treatment by Clarke (top). It has been edged out of the foreground, one populated by a vertiginous architectural hotch-potch of indeterminate provenance. Still, its status as cultural signifier means that its mere presence recalls – cannot help but recall – countless moments from cinema history (frequently from the third act). It has been climbed by a doomed King Kong, played host to perhaps the ultimate tear-jerking proposal in An Affair to Remember, and the pastiche/homage paid to it by Sleepless in Seattle. And, for eight hours and five minutes, it is the subject of Andy Warhol’s Empire.

Inadvertently conjuring tributes, laments and everything in-between, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Clarke’s record of what he describes as but a “brief moment” in the city’s history. The photographs evoke, he says, “a time when I became a New Yorker for one week.” The ‘moment’ the pictures capture punctuate a tumultuous period: from the AIDS crisis and the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to the outset of Rudi Giuliani’s term as mayor and the relative naivete (even if it didn’t seem so at the time) of a world which would, from 11 September, 2001, be forever changed.

Dualities abound: this is at once a time of sitcoms Seinfeld (below), and Friends, but also of the nihilistic casual sex and psychopathy of Larry Clark’s Kids. NYC is a city haunted by addiction (Abel Ferrara, The Addiction) and Patrick Bateman poseurs, yet it is a place whose streets people of course continue to flock to, streets, versions of them anyway, captured and continuously presented to us in a flood of simulacra.

From our current vantage point, then, these are photographs offering a multiple-lens reckoning, even as they look askance at the city and its icons of the built environment. Tourist snaps they aren’t. Such is New York’s cultural heft and baggage, however, that the blurring of the line between reality and otherwise is irresistible. Contained within each and every one of these images is a veritable tsunami of involuntary cultural recall.

Slippage between the layers, the real and hyperreal, is at this point unavoidable. In a chapter dedicated to New York in Ripped Backsides, his book ‘tracing ruined maps of the noir cities’, Richard Cabut writes: “Man says city isn’t a place or a movie or a painting, it’s a play about the rehearsal of a play. Like in that film we once saw.”

The film in question is likely Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre director, Caden Cotard, sets about making a massive production, the lines between fiction and reality indistinct. “There are millions of people in the world,” says Cotard, “and none of those people is an extra.” In another fragment from Ripped Backsides, Cabut, aptly, regards New York as a “City of unspooling film.”

New York, New York: a city so great they named it twice. City as filmic entity, an idea – or, more accurately, a palimpsest of ideas, each inseparable from the next. This is city as proliferation, a symphony of meaning, learned and transmitted via the screen, projecting at 24 frames per second – even within the bounds of a single photograph.

Mike Pinnington

New York 1995–1996 by Stephen Clarke is available now through Café Royal Books

All images © Stephen Clarke

Training his lens on a plethora of subcultures, photographer David Wright’s Tribes of England captures those enjoying the liberation of choice… 

In an infamous exchange, Lady Susan Hussey – a British noblewoman who served as ‘Woman of the Bedchamber’ and, later, ‘Lady of the Household’ to the Royal Family – asked Ngozi Fulani: “Where are you from? Where are you really from?” Fulani, who was born in London and is the founder of the charity Sistah Space, could not be identified by Lady Hussey as being from England but instead as being from ‘somewhere else’. This encounter is at the crux of what is perceived as so-called Englishness. It seems that for Hussey, Englishness has particular recognisable signifiers which include name, dress, values and culture. To some, the traits of Englishness are inherently obvious, others less so, and this marks a division in the nation’s views on belonging and associated rights.

Nationhood has become a central concern in this age of globalisation where identities often mediated by social media seemingly meld into homogeneity. Looking out for difference, the photographer David Wright (b. 1955) has been working on a set of portfolios titled Modern Tribes of England. Following in the historical tradition of the German photographer August Sander, who sought to capture and categorise a nation, Wright portrays different contemporary groups in his survey of self-identifying English types. His extensive approach includes: circus performers, climate change activists, Goths, gypsy Roma, Mods, Morris dancers, pagans, Punks, travelling showmen, and urban agriculturalists.

During the 1970s, Wright trained at the London College of Printing (currently the University of the Arts London). His tutors were Jorge Lewinski, known for his portraits of artists, and the documentarian Homer Sykes. The latter’s book, Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs (first published in 1977), is surely relevant as Sykes continued the legacy of the nineteenth-century photographer and politician Benjamin Stone to record the nation’s customs and traditions. The influence of these precedents is evident in Wright’s work and, perhaps, aims to pick up from where these others lead. Wright’s experience as a young student in London coincided with the emergence of Punk, which can be noted as an early influence on his own concern with subcultures. Following his studies in Photography, Wright studied Media Theory at postgraduate level; this provides another layer of understanding to his projects.

The exhibition Tribes of England at Chester Pride’s Rainbow Tea Rooms brings together a small selection of photographs from several of Wright’s Modern Tribes of England series. The subjects featured in this show include a clown, a Punk, a Mod, a Pearly King, a railway enthusiast and reenactors. The commonality of these figures is that the characters they become entails the act of consciously dressing-up. For the clown, the costume is a key component of his employment as a circus performer – this is a uniform that has tradition attached. Likewise, there is a traditional lineage for the Pearly King that dates back to the late nineteenth century when the London road sweeper Henry Croft adorned his suit with mother-of-pearl buttons. The Mod and the Punk have a more recent history and are products of post Second World War British pop culture; for them style, arguably, is the paramount signifier. Fantasists, enthusiasts and reenactors literally take on the clothes of someone else; these subcultures can be highly subjective and self-conscious but at the same time conscious of the other whose identity they share. For all of these actors there is the liberation of choice: all choose who they want to be, as opposed to their identities being enforced.

What would Lady Hussey make of these fellow citizens? The question: “Where are you from? Where are you really from?” becomes ‘Who are you? Who are you really?’ All of Wright’s subjects might answer ‘I am English but …’ This qualifier has become a core issue in our society. To some it may seem a challenge, even a rejection; to many it will be a necessity; and to others it is a choice. Largely, but with some exceptions, it is this last option that Wright documents. His tribes are exercising their rights to be who they want to be and to define their own values. This is notable with his series of climate change activists and urban agriculturalists (not included in this exhibition but viewable of Wright’s website). The inclusion of these ‘tribes’ in Wright’s survey connects with current concerns. Englishness moves beyond the rigidity of borders to encompass international citizenship.

David Wright’s own tribe is the photographic collective f8 Documentary. The group began in 2020 with five members; currently there are eighteen members including Patrick Ward, Barry Lewis, John Walmsley, David Collyer, Janine Wiedel, John Blumer and Homer Sykes. This collective focuses on documentary photography in Britain, a topic that has recently had several revivals with important exhibitions, including TATE Britain’s current The 80s: Photographing Britain. The work of these photographers, and guests, is regularly printed in the magazine f8 Documentary, published by Fistful of Books. Hussey’s question – rooted in xenophobia – reverberates as though she is actually asking it of herself rather than Ngozi Fulani; it is a question addressed by Wright with a more nuanced lens.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art and Design: Critical and Contextual Studies University of Chester

Curated by Stephen Clarke with wall text by Hannah Harry

Visit: Tribes of England: David Wright, at The Rainbow Tea Rooms, 28 Bridge St, Chester CH1 1NQ, is open until February 2025. FREE ENTRY

“He takes up the invitation to look, but also takes possession without payment – a visual act of shoplifting.” Curator Stephen Clarke on Too Good To Hide, a new exhibition of photography currently on display at Chester’s Rainbow Tea Rooms…

The photographer looks through the viewfinder; an internal mirror guides the eye through a series of lenses that bend light to focus. The process is basic: the photographer looks through the barrel of the camera lens; but it is also complex as light is refracted and reflected to produce an image. Tony Hayes, like many others, started to take an interest in photography with the straightforward act of making family snapshots. Later on, he stumbled across photobooks by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, which revealed to him photography as an art form. This led him to study at Mid Cheshire College (2016-17) and at the University of Chester where he gained his undergraduate degree in Photography; this was followed by a Master’s degree in Fine Art (2017-2021). Currently he is undertaking an AA2A (Artist Access to Art Colleges) residency.

The interaction between looking through a lens and the reflected image provided a metaphor for the American curator and writer John Szarkowski. In his catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978), Szarkowski identified the work of photographers – hence the title – as being either mirrors or windows. Photography as a mirror is when the photographer’s own sensibility becomes the subject – a mirror to their emotional state; whereas photography as a window is when the camera is used to explore the world. Arguably, the first approach is subjective self-expression, while the latter is objective documentary. Hayes brings these two approaches together in his project titled Window Dressing (2019). Hayes explored the urban environment through a series of images of shop windows, taking on the role of the consumer wandering about town gazing at the goods on sale. Shop window displays are constructed scenes made for the shopper. The pane of the window is inclusive, enabling the viewer to look into the shop, and also exclusive by protecting the products safely behind glass. In photographing shop windows Tony Hayes takes up the invitation to look, but he also takes possession without payment – a visual act of shoplifting.

Hayes has deliberately included his own reflection in his pictures and so his act of possession is objectively recorded as evidence by his camera. This conjoining of the image and image-maker has its notable precedents in the work of Lee Friedlander and Vivian Maier: there is the scene observed and this is brought together with the self-portrait. At this point Hayes’ pictures move from the objective window, outlined in Szarkowski’s text, to the reflection of a subjective presence that can be understood as an expressive gesture. The viewer is led to consider whether the imposition of the photographer is a sinister act as, in this case, he hovers over mannequins and the faces of models in adverts – he becomes a potential stalker with unknown, perhaps dark, intent. Opposing this interpretation, the bringing together of photographer (shopper) and his subject (products) can be seen as the power of consumerism persuading us to buy into a lifestyle. The caption in one shop window declares: TOO GOOD TO HIDE – a statement about the items on sale rather than the photographer who is consumed in the constructed scene. The shoplifter is caught in the act.

The outcome of the interaction between photographer, camera and subject is the photographic print. A consumed product in itself, the print is not a reflection nor is it something that the viewer sees through, it is an opaque surface. Positioned as the true consumer, the viewer of the print is made aware of the contrivance of the sale-person’s pitch – Hayes has made an objective record of the shop windows for the viewer to analyse. At the same time, Hayes raises questions about his own role in this process: is he the removed observer or is he revealing his own compliance with consumer culture? The bright colours of the window displays are reproduced by Hayes’ photographic prints: a bright green background behind the white legs of two shop dummies; and vivid orange surrounds a gold kimono jacket. Shoplifter becomes sales assistant as the photographer sells the image to the viewer.

The location of Tony Hayes exhibition, Too Good To Hide, is the Rainbow Tea Rooms in the centre of Chester – a place for the shopper to refresh, contemplate items purchased and plan where to visit next. Encountering these photographs in this environment of the café is to provide yet another perspective, as the shopper looks through the shop window from the inside out to the street; the relationship between the two positions is inverted as the outside becomes the subject to be looked at. Likewise, in relation to Hayes’ pictures, instead of the photographer looking through the lens via the viewfinder, his reflected presence is looking back through the viewfinder via the lens returning the gaze.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art and Design: Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

Too Good To Hide: Tony Hayes, Curated by Stephen Clarke with wall text by Hannah Harry, continues at The Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester until October 2024

The Rainbow Tea Rooms are situated in the centre of the city at 28 Bridge Street, CH1 1NQ. Opening hours: 9.30am – 5pm weekdays, 9am – 6pm Saturdays, 10am – 5pm Sundays.

All images © Tony Hayes

“The exhibition attempts to draw comparison with gender discourse in a historical context.” Curator Stephen Clarke introduces As She Likes It: Christine Beckett, a new photography exhibition foregrounding Drag Kings…

Rosalind is a girl who gets what she wants; in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, she is the central character: the Duke’s daughter, she is desired by Orlando, loved by Celia, and occupies both male and female roles in the story. Banished from court by her uncle who has usurped her father’s rule, she hides in the forest with her cousin Celia. Rosalind takes on the male name, Ganymede, after the beautiful mortal man of Greek Mythology who was abducted by the gods to serve as cup-bearer to Zeus. One of the roles of the cup-bearer was to ensure that the king’s drink was not poisoned, thus signifying the trustworthiness of the man. In the forest, Ganymede the trustworthy meets lovesick Orlando, who has also had to flee from the court, whereupon she/he promises to cure him of the affliction of love.

The most famous line from play is: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” (Act II, Scene VII). Lydia Bernsmeier-Rullow’s stage was at Via, the bar and nightclub situated on Manchester’s Canal Street. In 2014, Bernsmeier-Rullow (a.k.a. Dick Slick) and Drag King troupe The Boi Zone took over the Drag King night there, explicitly as a safe queer space. Although the show initially included live vocals and performances, the evening events eventually transformed into lip-synchs and karaoke. Bernsmeier-Rullow’s Dick Slick and Rosalind’s Ganymede share common traits: both are sharp and at the centre of the play, both play with normative gender roles. Dick Slick invited the photographer Christine Beckett to take photographs of the Drag King events; Beckett accepted, thus creating a document of the scene. These photographs, taken between 2015 and 2018, reveal the nature of this group of players as they act out their roles.

In September 2023, fifty-one of Beckett’s black and white photographs were published by Strawberry Girl Books in a limited first edition photobook of 130 copies. Beckett shows the Drag Kings dressing, posing, relaxing and performing. The division between ‘being’ and ‘performance’ blurred: when is the woman-as-man on stage and when are they not? Rosalind also blurs the division between woman-as-man when her Ganymede offers to play the part of Rosalind for Orlando, so that the suitor can act out his love: woman-as-man becomes man-as-woman but actually woman-as-man-as-woman. One image loaded with layered signs in Beckett’s photobook is that of two Drag Kings holding up a book titled Beards; the photographer is fully aware of the complex semiotic interplay.

The exhibition As She Likes It at Chester Pride’s Rainbow Tea Rooms includes ten photographs from Beckett’s book. Lined up together on one wall are four portraits. The Drag King Poppa Cherry leans against the wall in a doorway, hands in trouser pockets and noticeable bulge at the crotch. His companions are a long-haired, man-spreading rocker with a Superman t-shirt and leather waistcoat holding a can of Carlsberg beer; another pulls a faux muscle-flexing pose; and a chap with shades wearing a white t-shirt with Bolton Pride logo. On the opposite side of the exhibition space, Poppa Cherry (top) puts on his bow tie in front of the mirror, preparing for the evening; elsewhere, he is seen kissing the hand of a woman; maybe that of the photographer?

This exhibition was the outcome of a number of discussions; the first, between myself and Richard Euston, Head of Chester Pride Charity, in which we decided that the next exhibition in the programme at the Rainbow Tea Rooms should connect to and reflect aspects of the LGBTQ+ community. A chance meeting with Declan Connolly at Open Eye Gallery introduced me to the work of Christine Beckett. Further discussion with Beckett led to looking at her work in relation to documentary photography, especially her engagement with a specific group of people at a particular time, and to the issues surrounding gender identity.

The title of the exhibition, As She Likes It, attempts to draw comparison with gender discourse in a historical context. Shakespeare introduces a questioning humour to how we perceive our roles as male and female. Rosalind’s gender and sexuality in his play become ambiguous. The added twist to the tale is that in Shakespeare’s time, female roles on the stage were commonly played by boys; and so Rosalind is a boy (the actor) who plays a girl who plays a boy who plays a girl.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art and Design: Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

See As She Likes It: Christine Beckett, Curated by Stephen Clarke with wall text by Hannah Harry @ The Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester, until June 2024

The Rainbow Tea Rooms are situated in the centre of the city at 28 Bridge Street, CH1 1NQ. Opening hours: 9.30am – 5pm weekdays, 9am – 6pm Saturdays, 10am – 5pm Sundays.

All images © Christine Beckett

Artist Richard Crooks translates his phenomenological wanderings into dynamic colourful collage. Here, Stephen Clarke, curator of Crooks’ current show, finds parallels in the making of his work with the odyssey undertaken by Dorothy and her friends in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz…

At the beginning of the story ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’, written by L. Frank Baum (1900), the appropriately named Dorothy Gale is displaced from her home state of Kansas by a very strong wind. As she shelters in her family’s farmhouse, a cyclone lifts the building into the sky and then drops the structure in a strange and unfamiliar land. From this point of arrival, Dorothy travels through the magical Land of Oz following a path – the yellow brick road – that weaves through places that each have a distinct architecture and culture.

Her destination is the Emerald City that lies at the centre of the realm. This enchanting narrative may be transposed to the adventures of the artist Richard Crooks who, in the autumn of 2019, flew in to contemporary Japan to begin his one-month artist residency at ArtnShelter. For Westerners, Japan has all the wonders of the fictional landscape of Oz; it is this encounter between west and east, artist and the built environment, that generates the collages currently on display at Chester Pride’s Rainbow Tea Rooms.

As Dorothy undertakes her journey she meets three characters: the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Woodman. Each of these characters focus attention on parts of human nature: intelligence, courage and heart. Seemingly, the Scarecrow lacks a brain, the Lion lacks courage, and the Tin Woodman is unfeeling; however, as the story unfolds it becomes evident that the characters already possess the attributes they desire. Crooks is also accompanied by these three characteristics in his practice as an artist negotiating unfamiliar urban landscapes.

Richard Crooks completed his degree in Fine Art at Bath Academy of Art in 1987. This was followed by postgraduate studies at Wimbledon School of Art, Goldsmiths College and Cardiff School of Art and Design. Clearly his work has been informed by his academic background. At the outset of the story, the Scarecrow lacks formal qualifications but it becomes apparent that he is able to think in a logical manner. It is the application of acquired knowledge that demonstrates The Scarecrow’s intelligence. Crooks’ use of his own education is key. His beginnings as an artist were as a sculptor in the tradition of Anthony Caro. Later, he applied this formalist approach to ceramic artworks that retained the formalism, but as table top pieces had more delicacy. Drawing and collage have always played a part in his working methods. In recent years this two-dimensional approach has come to the forefront.

Crooks has undertaken several artist residencies, each in an environment that was unknown to him. He spent time exploring Kathmandu in Nepal, and Dhaka in Bangladesh by walking and cycling: his method of investigation is primarily physical. This is not the idle stroll of the flaneur, rather the lived experience favoured by the phenomenologist. It takes courage to encounter the unfamiliar territory of these large urban spaces. Like the friends of Dorothy, Crooks has to earn his self-knowledge. He records this very raw experience by making drawings and taking photographs. In the studio, the artist then attempts to bring some order to the collected chaotic fragments of his journeying: architecture, signs and people are strung together. The pieces Wacoal Whirl (below), Bao Bao Skytree Chiko fun and Spiral city break (above) express the tumultuous nature of the modern Japanese city.

Dorothy’s companion the Tin Woodman, whilst not a mechanical robot, is a figure that symbolises modes of industrial construction. Enchanted by the Wicked Witch of the East, the Tin Woodman’s axe had chopped off his limbs one by one. As this dismemberment proceeded, his body parts were gradually replaced by metal components, in effect making a facsimile of the original. This act of fragmentation and reconstruction mirrors the work of the artist as he takes bits of the city to then remake in the studio. Unlike the fate of the Tin Woodman, Crooks’ artworks become invested with heart as they portray his active engagement with Tokyo.

Ten of Crooks’ collages from his residency in Japan are on display in Chester. Unlike the monochrome Emerald City of Oz which Dorothy finally reaches, his destination is multicoloured. Bright yellow, hot pink, deep blue and fiery orange are the background for each picture, giving a rainbow display to the walls of the tea room. The Rainbow Tea Rooms were opened in May 2022 to provide a city centre space for the LGBTQ+ community. In our recent past the persecution of the community led to coded ways to hide one’s identity and, at the same time, to recognise others who shared the same values and needs.

The term ‘a friend of Dorothy’ was used as a euphemism for a gay man; maybe the phrase can now be reclaimed to refer to all of those that undertake transformative journeys and acknowledge a unity of diversity. At the close of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’, the heroine clicks her heels and the magic shoes (iconic ruby slippers in the film but silver in Baum’s book) transport her home. The artist is also whisked away from his brief residency back home through the magic of the airline ticket, where he tells his own story of people and buildings in faraway cities.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art and Design: Critical and Contextual Studies at the University of Chester

See Toyko Dayz: Richard Crooks, Curated by Stephen Clarke and wall text by Hannah Harry @ The Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester, December 2023 to March 2024

The Rainbow Tea Rooms are situated in the centre of the city at 28 Bridge Street, CH1 1NQ. Opening hours: 9.30am – 5pm weekdays, 9am – 6pm Saturdays, 10am – 5pm Sundays

“Tt became apparent that these photographs of Pompeii could stand in for Chester.” Stephen Clarke on Up Deva!, an exhibition drawing inspiration from sources as varied as past glories, Frankie Howerd comedy, Up Pompeii! and exotic creatures… 

Nearly two thousand years ago Pompeii was buried under volcanic ash and debris. The city’s population was wiped out and the buildings vanished from view. Over the centuries the location and even the name of this city were forgotten. In the late sixteenth century Pompeii’s presence became evident when it was excavated first by chance and then, much later, with purpose. By the twentieth century Pompeii was established as a site for tourists to visit. In 1989, it was as a tourist that I took my photographs. The site had become a sprawling collection of ruins covered in vegetation. The negatives of these black and white pictures lay dormant in my archive for 34 years; only recently have they been scanned and explored.

In conversation with illustrator Steph Coathupe it became apparent how these photographs of Pompeii could stand in for Chester. Both places are known for their Roman remains; but whereas one is the ruins of a city in its entirety, the other is a settlement that has incorporated Roman ruin into its fabric as it continually develops as an urban environment. As well as its connection to the ancient empire, Chester is home to one of the world’s leading zoos. It seemed an obvious step to bring together Roman ancestry and a modern zoo, and to let the animals roam the city. Coathupe had been working in the Art and Design department at the University of Chester as part of the AA2A (Artists Access to Art College) scheme. It was in the context of Chester Contemporary, curated by Ryan Gander, that we developed our discussion into a project.

The title of the exhibition, Up Deva! – an homage to the British sitcom Up Pompeii! (1969–1970) that starred Frankie Howerd – sets the tone. Humour was a key feature of this collaboration, born out of a satirical response to the hubris – not uncommon in the world of visual art – surrounding Chester Contemporary. The pictures of ruins are a reminder of past glory, while the inclusion of the brightly coloured animals could be interpreted as referring to the participants, both visitors and exhibitors, as exotic creatures invading this locale. The combination of my photographs and the drawings made by Coathupe bring to mind the characters in the Disney film Jungle Book (1967). In particular the scenes set in the ruins of the abandoned city that is inhabited by monkeys and ruled by King Louie the orangutan.

Not only have the animals taken ownership of the places where men once lived but they start to speak like them too. In the accompanying wall text, a third collaborator, the writer Hannah Harry, makes the connection between Chester and Pompeii as places of tourism. Harry also wrote brief captions for each picture that provide the animals with their own voices. These captions take the form of messages found on the backs of postcards that the animals might have sent to their families. This kind of anthropomorphism can be found in many children’s stories. One such example is the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) where the enchanted animals that inhabit the island of Naboombu interact with the human travellers of the flying bed with the magical bedknob.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (published between 1950 and 1956) conjures up another fantastic land of talking creatures. The god of Narnia is the great lion Aslan. For Up Deva!, Coathupe has a lion (below) introduce the viewers to the scene. Through an archway he welcomes us to the Large Theatre of Pompeii. This is the opening to the exhibition at the Rainbow Tea Rooms. To other scenes are added iguanas that overrun the courthouse, penguins that plunge into a painted mural, and a giraffe that pokes its head from an empty pool in the atrium of a house. These animals added to the photographs are gigantic, another effect of creative magic. The diminutive human tourists in one scene seem unaware of the danger of a huge python (top) that wraps itself around the walls of the amphitheatre.

A sinister vision of wild animals taking control was portrayed in the film Planet of the Apes (1968). Following a nuclear war, the world is ruled by orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The exhibition has this undercurrent, raising the possibility of what would happen if the city suffered a cataclysm and the animals of the zoo escaped to prowl the streets of Chester. In 1986, such a fate did befall the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, which became uninhabitable following a nuclear catastrophe. Eventually, the deserted human settlement was overrun by flora and fauna. As with ancient Pompeii, the modern post-apocalyptic landscape of Chernobyl became a tourist destination and a fascination to some artists. Less welcome were more recent visitors to this city in the form of invading Russian military, a reminder of the precarious nature of civilisation.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art and Design: Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

Up Deva! Steph Coathupe, Stephen Clarke, and Hannah Harry continues at The Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester until December 2023, and is part of the Chester Contemporary Fringe

“Where does historical examination end and artistic response begin?” Hannah Harry considers an exhibition juxtaposing West Cheshire Museums’ collection with contemporary artists’ responses…  

The question of how curation affects our way of seeing is central to Lost, Found, Given ~ Stored, Shown, Seen – a selection of artists’ responses to artefacts housed and displayed at Chester’s Grosvenor Museum. Many of the works here, displayed in most cases alongside the artefact that inspired them, raise the question of how the taxonomy of museum collections affects the way we respond to artefacts. Where does historical or scientific examination end and artistic response begin? How do these responses differ? And what does this suggest about the way museum collections influence our viewing habits?

Alongside the museum’s butterflies can be seen a historic photograph of young girls, arranged in rows as in a school photograph. This photograph is not an image of youthful gaiety, of young limbs in abandoned release or the fragility of childhood beauty, despite the flowers arranged so prettily on each young head. Instead, the girls are arranged in static rows according to height and age, each one in her exact place. Arranged like this, the girls can be contemplated with as much scrutiny as the butterflies alongside them, the intricacies of their clothing and facial anatomy observed in detail. We understand each girl in relation to her place within the group; her existence is recorded, documented, fixed – she has become a specimen.

Both girls and butterflies prompt us to consider the effect of mobility on the way we view an object; how much longer can a viewer spend contemplating a fixed artefact than a living specimen? And how does this affect the way we view and understand it?

The issue of time is addressed by David Raffo’s modern piece, Dwell Time – four photographs of metal and glass vessels in the museum collection, each photograph the result of an increased exposure time, resulting in a succession of images from a clear-cut reproduction of the vessels in all their detail to a shimmering blur of darkness and light. Raffo asks us to consider how the length of time we consider an object in a museum affects our memory of it. What do we remember from our brief encounter? Something functional? Interesting? Beautiful?

This theme permeates Tabitha Jussa’s contemporary botanical inkjet prints, in which the intimacy of our encounters becomes significant. Jussa’s magnified print of a poppy ovary is a gloriously organised riot of pattern and colour – yet another example of how scientific observation can prompt aesthetic delight and discovery. Jussa’s inclusion of a microscope containing a slide produced by James Hornell and dating from between 1895-1901 allows us to examine the beauty of natural patterns first hand.

Her decision to display a family medicine cabinet and private copy of Nicolas Culpeper’s British Herbal (originally published in 1653) alongside various medicinal items from the museum’s archive draws associations between scientific enquiry, aesthetic appreciation and the practical application of botany, leading us into the fascinating realm of folklore. Where is the dividing line between science, art and magic? Is there one at all?

The significance of generic boundaries is explored in Chris Millward’s highly playful Emperor Christophorous Molendinarius, a digital image and accompanying statement generated by artificial intelligence. Millward has inserted himself into Chester’s Roman past in somewhat futuristic fashion – by programming AI to add his facial features to an existing sculpture of a Roman general. A body of text, also generated by AI, presents an account of the life of the fictional Christophorus Molendinarius.

To an unsuspecting viewer, this piece of fiction and its accompanying image – of a sculpture which does not exist outside of the picture frame – could easily be taken for historical fact. Millward’s piece draws attention to the stylistic significance of how history is presented to us in museums and galleries and raises questions about the nature of historical veracity. Do we understand history to be more ‘truthful’ than art? Should we?

How truthful or otherwise is the small and beautiful etching by artist Greg Fuller? Fuller has used the traditional, laborious medium of etching, to produce an image that captures a particular quality of evening light at a specific Cheshire location – a bridge over the Sankey Navigational Canal. Here is a record of monochrome marks produced by the conjunction of the artist’s hand with the corrosive effects of acid on copper plate and the impression of ink on paper. The black spaces here are more than just pools of ink, the white more than simply paper.

How important is the specificity of a scene to such a representation? And what questions does this raise about the curation of artworks depicting Cheshire scenes in the museum collection? By reading such artworks primarily through the lens of the location depicted, do we miss a spiritual dimension to their meaning?

Stephen Clarke’s Carnival Queen raises comparable questions about our understanding of the past and its relationship to personal histories. His response to an historical engraving of a wicker man in the museum collection is a photomontage combining a 1947 photograph of his mother as Carnival Queen in Parr, St Helens, with rubbings of her floral wallpaper and a collection of images taken from his grandfather’s gardening books. The link here is the tradition of the May Queen and the question raised: what place do personal, yet shared histories have in museum collections and how can they shape our interpretation of the past?

Past; present; future; science; history; art.

Lost, Found, Given asks us to consider these generic boundaries with a view to questioning how they help shape the taxonomy of museum collections. At stake is the way we understand our relationship to the past, both individually and collectively.

Hannah Harry

Lost, Found, Given ~ Stored, Shown, Seen: Artists’ Responses to the West Cheshire Museums’ Collections continues at Grosvenor Museum, Chester, until 3 September

Exhibition install images courtesy Jeremy Turner

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – Alien Resident: Under Investigation @ Ropes & Twines, Bold Street, Liverpool – FREE

We’ve long admired speciality coffee shop Ropes & Twines’ commitment to displaying carefully curated photography. Organised since 2019 by Merseyside photography instigators SixBySix, the latest work in the space is by Chester-based Stephen Clarke, whose beautifully composed black and white pictures offer up a glimpse of 1980s Americana. Made during a year he spent post-graduation in San Diego, they are the response of a stranger in a strange land; and yet – mediated via TV and film – they feel oddly familiar. Drink them in with some of Liverpool’s finest coffee.

Read Over My Shoulder – Hollywood and the Photographs of Stephen Clarke

Tuesday – Macbeth [imitating the dog] @ the Playhouse, Liverpool – £11-£31

The wyrd sisters; the power behind the throne; and the loneliness of ambition. Macbeth’s key messages resonate down the centuries and continue to ring loudly in our times. So, it is little wonder then, that a new production of perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous and iconic play arrives this week at the Playhouse. Retold by imitating the dog, expect a fusion of live action and innovative tech to update the period piece as contemporary ‘neon noir’ thriller.

Wednesday – Alien Day: Alien/Aliens Double Bill @ FACT Liverpool – £13.20/concessions

It all begins with a fateful distress call from the terraformed moon LV-426. It will end (but also continue across many a sequel) in discovery, carnage and no small loss of life. Yes, this is the Alien universe, whose departure point – Ridley Scott’s Alien – remains the high watermark for many an aficionado. But why argue about what iteration of the franchise makes for the finest when you can sit back and, if not relax exactly, take in this timely double-bill of Xenomorph-inspired sci-fi horror.

Read A Special Kind Of Devil: Remembering H.R. Giger

Thursday – Richard Dawson @ The Tung Auditorium, Liverpool – £22.50

Expansive and ambitious, Richard Dawson’s latest album The Ruby Cord completes a trilogy of sorts alongside 2017’s Peasant and its follow-up, titled 2020. The blurb asks the listener to “Pop in your earpiece, close your eyes and embrace the wonders (and horrors) of augmented reality and prepare to travel 500 years into the future.” Transported by Dawson’s songs, when we get there, the future bears a remarkable similarity to now – which speaks more to the grim reality of present day Earth than it does to any failure of our time-travelling troubadour. As he observes: “It’s a leap into a future that is well within reach, in some cases already here.”

Friday – Apollo Remastered @ Williamson Art Gallery and Museum – FREE

Space, as a certain tech billionaire knows all too well, remains the final frontier. But when Kennedy announced in his 1962 speech that “we choose to go to the moon”, everything seemed possible – even if it was unimaginable by most. The mission that saw humans set foot on the moon was Apollo 11, an event that, in some ways, we’re still coming to terms with (as SpeaceX’s recent explosion indicates). So, it is with a kind of awe that we view images from that feted era, and this exhibition invites us to explore the Moon landings up close across spacewalks, iconic views of Earth and more.

Saturday – LuYang Arcade Liverpool, Curator Tour @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

The language of video games has long been used by contemporary artists. Increasingly, as hierarchies collapse and gaming has encroached on mainstream acceptability, this has been less formalism and more genuine cultural exploration. The work of Shanghai-based artist LuYang, who has said “creating a game is like creating your own world,” embraces this, to experiment with “identity, nationality, gender – even your existence as a human being”. In their new exhibition, that means a gallery full of retro-futuristic games drawing on anime, sci-fi, Buddhism and neuroscience. Join FACT’s Head of Programme, Maitreyi Maheshwari this Saturday, should you need help navigating this brave new world.

Sunday – Under a Hot Sun by Kathryn Maple @ the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

The John Moores Painting Prize 2020 winner stars in a solo show at the Walker Art Gallery. In our review, which you can read here, Maja Lorkowska-Callaghan describes Under a Hot Sun as a richly deserved focus on the artist’s practice. Drawn from works made across 365 days audiences, says Lorkowska-Callaghan, are advised to “set aside some time, for this is not a show to rush through”.

Mike Pinnington

Images, from top: © Stephen Clarke; Alien Promotional Poster; LuYang, Material World Knight (2018) still. Courtesy of the artist