Making Strange at Electro Studios in West St Leonards

The Seaside Road studios of Colin Booth have a record of impressive and worthwhile work. Final viewings of the present Coastal Currents show will be on the weekend 13-15 September, though admittance might also be possible by appointment. Bernard McGinley reports.

The Electro Studios Project Space in Seaside Road (at Seaside Way), West St Leonards, has built a good reputation in recent years, for as long as it has been open. The current exhibition is Making Strange, works by Colin Booth.

A survey show of works, Making Strange is a reference to Russian formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky’s 1925 essay ‘Art as Technique’:

The purpose of Art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar . . .

In the 1920s flux and aftermath of War and Revolution, the perception seems related to Ezra Pound’s modernist principle at the same time, ‘Make It New’. Shklovsky (1893-1984) was a critic interested in literature and film and the critical (but ununified) school known as Formalism. His associates included Eisenstein, the film-maker, and the futurist poet Mayakovsky. Colin Booth explains further:

Unfamiliarity may be fleeting but it leads to an imperceptible shift in our cognitive understanding of things and in what we know and perceive of as art.

The exhibition is open on 13 – 15 September from 12 noon to 5 p.m. (Additionally visits by appointment might be possible:  email info@electrostudiosprojectspace.co.uk, or Instagram @electro_studios_project_space .)

Outposts

Avant-garde samplings of the exhibition are also to be found in central St Leonards, in the lower London Road area at Black Gull bookshop (at North Street). The windows have a celebration of the survival in fragmentary form of the Greek poet Sappho from 2½ thousand years ago. Booth writes:

The gradual shift of time and memory is a delicate shroud that envelopes us all.

Collected Fictions winebar (opposite Saxon Street), and Graze on Grand (on the seafront at 16 Grand Parade) also have tastes of Making Strange.

Electro Studios (and Coastal Currents) continues to provide art of quality, and often unexpected. St Leonards is fortunate that way.

More details and directions can be found on the Electro Studios website

www.electrostudiosprojectspace.co.uk

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