Exhibitions

'Love Me'

Photography by Zed Nelson

Saturday 5 May to Sunday 24 June 2012

Award-winning photographer Zed Nelson reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty.

The exhibition explores a new form of globalisation, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand. Whilst Nelson's subjects appear willing participants in an omnipresent culture of bodily improvement, they might equally be considered hapless victims - at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into an insatiable craving for approval. As the subject's frailties and pretensions are exposed, so too are we the viewer: our motives for looking, for inspecting, along with uncomfortable reminders of our own vanities and insecurities.

An impression Gallery and Ffotogallery Touring Exhibition.

'About Face'

Pastels by Henry Tonks

Saturday 5 May to Sunday 24 June 2012

Henry Tonks (1862 - 1937) was a qualified surgeon and an artist, practising and teaching medicine but also producing artistic work and teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art. During the First World War, he initially joined the Royal Army Medical Corps but then, from April 1916, worked with Harold Gillies at his plastic surgery unit at the Cambridge Hospital, Aldershot, and then at the plastic surgery dedicated Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup. The pastel drawings by Tonks in this exhibition date from this period and starkly document and illustrate facial injuries sustained by servicemen during the conflict, and the progress of their surgery.

Tonks' pastel drawings not only serve as a record of the physical injury and the subsequent medial intervention but, by crossing into the field of portraiture, highlight some of the personal and emotional cost of these wounds as well as revealing the artistic, anatomical and surgical skill of their creator.

There are a number of talks to compliment this exhibition, including novelist Pat Barker reading from her own work. Visit our Events Page for more information on these talks.

The works in this exhibition are loaned by the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and curated in partnership with Durham University's Centre for Medical Humanities.

'Big Meetings'

Julian Germain

Saturday 30 June to Sunday 9 September 2012

The annual Durham Miner's Gala or 'Big Meeting' provides an outlet for local communities to reflect on their social, cultural, political and industrial heritage. It is the highlight of the yar for the 70 or more brass bands that lead the parade, and offers a populist platform for countless left leaning and radical political organisations, trades unions and campaign groups.

Julian Germain was invited to experience and photograph the Gala in 2011. He has also visited the community centres, band rooms, offices and houses of a range of the participating individuals and organisations across the region to produce a broader and more significant representation of the event.

His work asks questions about the nature of politics now, at a point in history where it is widely held that socialist ideals have been buried by consumerism.

Join us for a free preview of this new exhibition on 29 June 2012 when we stay open until 10.00pm with live music and pay bar.

We also have a talk on 30 June entitled 'The Miner in Art: a New Look' by Gail-Nina Anderson at 2pm. Click here for more information.

Part of Brass: Durham International Festival, 6 - 22 July 2012 - www.brassfestival.co.uk