The Colour Bright was commissioned in collaboration with Sheffield Children’s Festival and Art Sheffield, Site Gallery is delighted to present The Colour Bright, new work by Juneau Projects (Birmingham, UK)
Click here to see a short clip of the work produced.
The Colour Bright imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which society and culture have had to simultaneously evolve and regress in order to survive an unspecified disaster.
The exhibition shares its name with the main work in the exhibition, a four-minute looped animation made in collaboration with approximately one thousand school children from across Sheffield and Derbyshire. The starting point for the work is Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, the location of the only known British cave art and the most northerly example of prehistoric art in Europe.
The animation was made through Rotoscoping: each frame of a film – shot at Creswell Crags – printed out, a sheet of acetate placed over it and onto which an image hand-painted by child. These hand-painted cells were then combined to create a hypnotic animation depicting a flame-bearing figure moving through a cave and the surrounding landscape.
Other works in the exhibition grew from the animation. The framed paintings were made using a similar technique to the individual animation cells; they depict scenes from the world in which the animation is set, a world in which people are forced to revert to Prehistoric methods of survival. Relics of our technological culture still exist in this world and are repurposed and recycled in this new version of society. Alongside the paintings are a series of sculptures that double as artefacts from this imagined world.
The final work in the show is an animated wallpaper installation. The installation functions as a form of cave art: simple animations move on the wall as the light in the space shifts from red to blue to green, each colour negating the lines painted onto the wallpaper.