July : FREEDOM
The theme for July is FREEDOM
Watch the third exhibition tour and LIVE event here.
FREEDOM
Lockdown. I’m surprised how quickly the memory of traveling, or meeting up with someone, or eating in a restaurant can fade away when confronted with day after day of lockdown life. In one way, freedom the opposite of lockdown - our movements are heavily restricted, there are rules governing what we can and cannot do. But I’ve also heard many lockdown experiences that are, in fact, quite freeing. Freedom from commuting, freedom from social obligations and an almost prescribed freedom to go for a walk, to experience Spring.
Does some feeling of freedom in one part of our lives balance out severe restrictions in another? Perhaps so.
Why is freedom so romanticised in the Western world? Freedom from what? We are a part of any number of deliberate and automatic groupings - countries and subcultures - biological families and systems of support. Is it a matter of asserting the will of an individual over the consensus of a group?
This exhibition examines the state of being ‘one of many’. I certainly feel more like a statistic now than I ever have, with the constant stream of numbers and charts and comparisons in the news throughout this epidemic. And while I am indeed happy that here in Wales we are now ‘free’ to travel more than 5 miles, it will be a long time before any of us are ‘free’ to live life as we used to. I don’t know how I feel about that yet.
7 July, 2020
Julie Upmeyer