After Balance UnBalance, I had a great time visiting long time friend and mentor Paul Brown in London. Now I will be honest here – I am not one for big cities and was just a wee bit nervous about negotiating trains etc in such a busy place. Thankfully with some help from Paul and mates on Facebook, I was able to get there without too much drama (aside from the long delay at somewhere in Sussex).
It was really great to be shown around by Paul who knows London well. We went to the Tate Modern and the Whitechapel Gallery and saw some fantastic exhibitions including a large retrospective of Alberto Giacometti’s work, a fantastic exhibition on the art and artists responding to the Civil Rights movement in the US Soul of the Nation: Art in the age of Black Power and a retrospective of Fahrelnissa Zeid, a female Turkish artist who produced some monumental abstract works in the 1950s.
Whitechapel Gallery had a brilliant group show titled A Handful of Dust: Photography after Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, a “speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction and natural disasters to urban decay, domestic dirt and forensics.”
“Conceived by writer and curator David Campany, the exhibition takes as a starting point the 1920 photograph taken by American artist Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp’s work in progress The Large Glass (1915–23) deliberately left to gather dust in his New York studio.”
This art smorgasbord was followed by an delicious Indian meal at Paul’s favorite restaurant in the city. The following day was also good fun as we explored Croydon and had excellent Laksa at a Malaysian cafe. It was nice to say some of my few Bahasa Indonesian words and to be understood so far from SE Asia.
We also had some great conversations – I really loved sharing thoughts and texts on sacred geometry and philosophy. Need to get follow up on these texts! Interesting how some of these diagrams also are embedded in the Wyrd symbol.
The big park at Croydon was a lovely place to visit and the community garden is thriving!
Paul and I also played with my new cheapie VR headset – going on a roller coaster!
Thank you so much Paul for making London fun and not too scary 🙂
Tracey M Benson || Bytetime 