A local art gallery salutes a musical giant this month.
With its latest exhibition entitled Tangled Up in Blue, Quest Art School + Gallery hope its members can garner some inspiration from all-around music legend Bob Dylan while also borrowing its title from the iconic song of the same name, which was written and recorded by the American songwriter in 1975.
Quest curator Virginia Eichhorn said she wanted to create an exhibition that would be fun for participants to explore.
“I really wanted to have something fun and playful,” she said, noting artists are often used to painting landscapes so this affords them another challenge. “A lot of our themes tend to be nature-based."
With close to 30 participating artists, the exhibition that will continue once the gallery reopens features a diverse range of visual responses to the notion of being Tangled Up In Blue in a variety of mediums.
Eichhorn said Dylan was inspired by his exposure to Cubism, which offered a new approach to representing reality through art, by bringing together multiple, fragmented depictions of the same subject.
“Akin to the Cubist art movement, Dylan’s song skips from first- to second- and third-person perspectives as it narrates and contemplates a romance that spans years,” she said, noting the song itself provides reminisces of a nostalgic past while anticipating an uncertain future.
The track is essentially a love story, and widely considered a quintessential example of Dylan’s attempt at ‘multidimensional’ songwriting, in which the lyrics defy a fixed notion of time and space and express viewpoints from multiple perspectives.
For artist Frieda Ambroziak, the decision to participate in this specific exhibition was an easy one.
“I’ve been a Quest member for nine years and blue’s my favourite colour,” she said. “To me, the colour represents the calm of the earth, the sky and the water. I created these paintings specifically for the exhibition.”
Fellow member Charlotte Sprague said always enjoys the chance to be part of the Midland gallery's member shows.
“You always want to get your work out there and show it with other artists,” she said.
Aaron White started painting three years ago and hasn’t looked back.
“The theme combined with a particular artist could result in a lot of different interpretations and that’s what I see here,” he said.
