Cathy's Art Diary

Thoughtful exhibition at Halcyon Gallery looking at how three artists use national and political figures and imagery to look at identity. The show included a classic set of Andy Warhol’s Chairman Mao screen prints which fascinatingly reproduces an image in different colourways so it ceases to have its original meaning and an impact. These were shown alongside some powerful portraits of individuals wrapped in flags by Mitch Griffiths, from a soldier in conflict to a vulnerable young woman in an American flag. The works are so highly finished and realistic I had to check online that they were paintings not photographs. However my favourites were Dominic Harris’s digital butterfly works. In the one shown here butterflies make up the American flag but if you touch the surface they break free and fly around the image. In another they fly away and return in a different colour. Larger individual works hung together react to sound and fly away if you clap or shout. Thank you to the securi

Magical exhibition at the Halycon Gallery of video presentations by Dominic Harris. It’s hard to find an overarching label to describe this show. It was digital works presented like paintings or nature studies. The commentary called them a “surreal and whimsical take on reality set in the context of art history”.   Flowers, birds and butterflies looked still but as you walked past them they moved in interaction with you. With the sunflower shown here its petals moved gently in a breeze and in a representation of butterflies mounted in a case, one by one they flapped their wings. My favourite were four pictures referencing Dutch flower pictures which gradually got more modern and minimal until the last was just falling petals. The gallery assistant showed me how, if you moved your hand across them, you could move the flowers or they retreated into buds if you touched them. I could have played with it for hours! I wasn’t so taken with the Disney works. Harris is one of t