SVA exhibition

Just took a quick look at the SVA – Stroud Valley Arts – exhibition. Some good and intriguing and some truly dreadful and poorly executed.

Oogoo Maia’s sonic found object sculptures tickled me. The first, I thought a poorly executed play on music by Steve Reich, using feedback from swinging microphones over speakers – the sonic part was not interesting or engaging – but on a second look, the fact that it had been entirely fabricated from the charity shop was cool and made me giggle.

SVA’s big venture are the SITE festivals. These are open studios in and around Stroud of art of all types and genres and all qualities, and this is good. A truly democratic hotch potch lucky dip kind of happening, as all funded community art should be. The people who pay their subscriptions to SVA are artists of all kinds, the majority sadly under represented. SVA it seems, feel that they have a grander venture, the promotion of what they feel is modern art – mostly of a conceptualist bent. The trouble is they are using other people’s money to do this and they have hardly the discerning taste of a Charles Saachi or a Michael Collins, especially if the present exhibition is anything to go by. The exhibition stinks more of cronyism – the names are the usual SVA suspects even though application to be exhibited was supposedly open to all SVA members – than quality. I’m no Stuckist, back to skill flag waver – there are enough of those in Stroud – but I do feel SVA’s purpose is to represent art in Stroud than to be a White Cube.