Community art exhibition foregrounds new youth voices in research
We were incredibly proud to see the first of our two community art exhibitions launched in Southampton at the start of April 2022. Dial up featured the artwork of a group of young people based in Southampton and reimagined the phone as an object, image and communication device and its effects on young people.
Description of the exhibition and accompanying materials.
The exhibition was the result of interpretative work undertaken by the group as part of Telephonic Youth’s collaboration with John Hansard Gallery. Beginning in November 2021, the young people worked with artist Russell Squires in a series of workshops over five months in which they responded to materials and themes from our research.
The young artists, known as The Telephonic Trio, experimented with a range of photographic styles. Inspired by Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series, they took photographs of the parts of disassembled landline telephones. They also drew on the traditions of vanitas still life artworks which used symbolic objects to remind the viewer of their mortality. Playing with this genre, The Telephonic Trio created atmospheric photographs that centred the phone.
The Telephonic Trio’s work spoke to the iconography of the 1980s and 1990s – our historical era – in playful ways. In their light painting photographs, the artists created colourful representations of the telephone number pad that were inspired by the neon colours in advertisements for phone chat lines found in teenage magazines of the late 1980s. In a nod to the zine culture of the 1990s, they created zines reflecting on varied associations of young people’s phone use, drawing on materials from BT Heritage & Archives’ collection, ephemera and creative writing.
Dial up has made a wonderful contribution to our research project and the questions we are asking. Moving between the imagery and the language of the telephone, it explores shifts and connections between young people’s phone use past and present. There are ways in which this is a distinctively Southampton show: all of the artworks were created in the city’s John Hansard Gallery or city centre by young Sotonians. But the show also points to the scales of connection and influence far beyond the city itself. Notably, The Telephonic Trio referenced the influence of Jamaican patois on the way young people from different cultural backgrounds in Britain speak on the phone today. Through this, Dial up presented a global story of contemporary youth culture.
Exhibition keywords.
Dial up was on display in John Hansard Gallery from 6 April until 7 May 2022. Some of The Telephonic Trio’s photography is also reproduced in our second community exhibition, Thinking inside the box, in K6 Gallery (located in the two red telephone boxes on Castle Way, Southampton), which is on show from 6 April until 10 July 2022.
Featured image: Photograph of Dial up at John Hansard Gallery by Reece Straw.
