31 October at 8pm
JD Bar, 4 Claremont, Hastings
Photology presents, for PhotoHastings 2016, two talks by two leading artists in Photomontage whose parallel paths (both were born in 1949 and studied at The Slade) describe very different journeys.
Peter Kennard “Off Message”
“Pure and dirty,” is how the critic John Berger once described Peter Kennard’s photomontages. Born in London in 1949, the activist/artist has been at the cutting edge of political image making since the Vietnam War, holding a mirror up to war, poverty and human suffering. Kennard describes his work as an attempt to “rip apart the smooth, bleached and apparently seamless surface of the media’s presentation of the world and to expose the conflict and grubby reality underneath.”
As a student of Slade School of Fine Art in the late 1960s, Kennard abandoned painting in search of a medium more suited to his activism. He began splicing together photographs, re-imagining their content to create the influential and provocative works that have become icons of political art. Pushing his work and its message out into the world beyond the confines of museums and galleries has always been crucial to his motivation, and he has long advocated the free distribution of his works. His images for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, most famously the broken missile wedged in a CND symbol, were used widely in the 1980s and are still deployed in protests today.
Claire Holland, The Daily Telegraph, 2015.
Image Credit: Peter Kennard. Crushed Missile (rough), 1980
Information: Peter Kennard
His retrospective exhibition “Off Message” is at MAC Birmingham until 27 November 2016.
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