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Epstein Theatre opens - so party time
Former Neptune is all sparkly and shiny

Camp and Furnace launches with party
Cool Baltic style venue opens in coldest May for 100 years (probably)

Weekend larks (May 4-6)
Bob the Builder, 10cc-ish, art on Penny Lane and May the fourth be with you

First music expo staged
All the gizmos and gadgets as part of Sound City

Weekend larks #2: Hair Studio snipping party
Thirty years and still cutting it

Weekend larks #1: - The salmon simulator
Be a big fish in a small pond at the Bluecoat

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Weekend Larks (Nov 4-6)

International Guitar Festival, movies at Edge Hill Station, Pin Ups and another jumble sale

Written by Katja Driver. Published on November 4th 2011.

Plucking hell
OK, so this weekend we celebrate Guy Fawkes not blowing up the Parliament by blowing up a load of over-priced fireworks. But it’s not all about things that go boom, the next few days.

It’s also about things that go... stringy? Strung? Anyway, the International Guitar Festival of Great Britain, apparently the oldest and largest annual festival of its kind, kicks off this weekend. The programme promises to illuminate the breadth and scope of the guitar, highlighting its importance within every musical genre.

Je suis un rock starFeatured artists this year include Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, Bellowhead, Phil Manzanera, Martin Taylor’s Gypsy Journey, Tony Remy & The Blues Experience and classical guitarist Xuefei Yang, as well as the Katona Twins and The Impossible Gentlemen, featuring the incredible Mike Walker and Mercury Prize nominated pianist, Gwilym Simcock.

Guitar workshops will take place covering playing styles, guitar maintenance and detailed sessions on working within the music industry, a must if you fancy yourself as the next Richie Sambora. And, to top it off, a special concert featuring the Wirral Schools Jazz Orchestra and guitar virtuosi, Esmond Selwyn spotlights the vibrant musical youth within Wirral.

*International Guitar Festival of Great Britain, all around the Wirral during November. For more information and tickets, see here

Pin Ups
YOU also might want to check out Pin Ups - an exhibition of portraits by Matthew Stradling & Sadie Lee.

Part of Homptopia, which opens this weekend, it takes its name from the David Bowie 1970s album of cover versions of some of his favourite songs.

Here Matthew and Sadie have created a series of new portraits that turn the sitter into their own version of an iconic Pin Up in their first exhibition together.

Both Sadie's and Matthew's subject matter and cultural references are strongly influenced by popular music. Artists such as David Bowie were crucial in allowing new ideas about sexuality and gender to infiltrate popular culture in the 1970s. Boys in make-up wearing feather boas and girls in suits and skin-head feather-cuts danced to his tracks in school discos where a new generation of musicians were to take this aesthetic forward into punk and new romantic fashion and style.

Mathew and Sadie were very much part of this revolution, and swapped tapes to listen to while they worked on their paintings of the likes of Marc Almond and Holly Woodlawn.

Whilst Sadie’s new portraits of her own personal celebrities may intentionally relate to Andy Warhol’s screen prints, they also subvert them by bringing centuries of painterly tradition to the Pop Art aesthetic.

Matthew similarly references the repetitive nature of Pop Art to portray his own Pin Up in a series of portraits, though these are treated in the grand manner of the 18th Century Masters rather than the throwaway medium of the polaroid.

*Pin Ups, The Gallery, Upper Stanhope St, Liverpool, from Friday November 4 onwards. Free

Going Kukoo
Kukoo Fairs are back from their summer break with what they boast to be their biggest and best ever event! The non-profit vintage and craft fairs organisers are again pulling a fantastic day from their 1950s bag.

It’s not just about clothes and fashion in this day of fun and frolics. While getting to know what the event has to offer you can sip on cocktails and stuff cupcakes down your gob. Then there obviously is the compulsory show of vintage clothing and accessories, but it doesn’t end there. Visitors are introduced to crafts, jewellery, art and fancily recycled items all in Navy Bar’s somewhat kitsch surroundings.... oh and did we mention the top tunes?

*Kukoo Vintage Fair, Navy Bar, Stanley St, Saturday 5^th November, from 12pm, FREE EVENT

Film Station
And, if you really want to hide away from the booming fireworks, find classic movies at Metal on Tunnel Road.

This Friday they offer a cult classic, The Colour Purple (15), directed by Steven Spielberg. Following that, on consecutive Fridays, you can enjoy The General (U) Directed by Clyde Bruckman & Buster, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (15) by John Cameron Mitchell.

Metal was founded by Jude Kelly OBE in 2002 and was created as an artistic laboratory to champion the need for continual investment in artistic investigation and the development of innovative ideas that could shift the thinking in the UK cultural sector.

Alongside providing space for artists and thinkers to develop their ideas and further the philosophy of their work, Metal are interested in how this artistic process can potentially influence political and social issues of the day.

But wait! There’s more! If you would like to nominate a film screening please contact Jenny or Adrian at Metal with the above details and who knows, maybe the next screening will have something of your own liking... maybe even a film of your own. Metal are looking for local artist's short films (max 20 mins) to show before features. Please submit DVD's, short synopses or web-links to edgehill@metalculture.com or hand them in at a film screening.

*Film Station: The Colour Purple, Friday November 4, Metal at Edge Hill Station, at 6.30pm and 8.30pm

Lewis Carroll’s timeless novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, have fascinated and inspired many generations of artists since the first novel was published over 150 years ago. Alice in Wonderland at Tate Liverpool is the first exhibition to provide a comprehensive historical exploration of how the stories have influenced the visual arts, providing insight into the creation of the novels, the adoption of the text as an inspiration for artists and the revision of its key themes by artists up to the present day.

The starting point for the exhibition is Carroll’s original manuscript, given to the twelve year old Alice Liddell as a Christmas present in 1864. Carroll’s own illustrations in the manuscript, and the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel in the first published edition, indicate that images were an integral part of the story, creating a visual world which took on a life of its own. Carroll was very much part of the art scene of his day: a photographer and art connoisseur, he mixed in artistic circles and counted artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir John Everett Millais amongst his friends. Work by Rossetti and Millais will feature, alongside paintings by William Holman Hunt and Arthur Hughes, referenced in Carroll’s diaries. There will be a rare opportunity to view Carroll’s own drawings, photographs and photographic equipment, alongside Victorian Alice memorabilia, documents from early stage adaptations, and original drawings by Sir John Tenniel.

Carroll’s stories were soon adopted by artists, both inspiring and providing an expression for themes within their work. Surrealist artists from the 1930s onwards were drawn towards this fantastical world where natural laws were suspended. There will be the opportunity to see Salvador Dalí’s series of twelve Alice in Wonderland illustrations and work by Max Ernst, René Magritte and Dorothea Tanning. The British Surrealists, dubbed ‘the children of Alice,’ will be examined, with key pieces from Paul Nash, Roland Penrose, Conroy Maddox and F.E. McWilliam.

From the 1960s through the 1970s, conceptual artists took Alice as foil for exploring our relationship to perception and reality, and the stories inspired responses in both Pop and Psychedelic art. This section will bring together work by Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Dan Graham, Yayoi Kusama, Adrian Piper, and Marcel Broodthaers amongst others to highlight the era’s responses to the novel as it reached its centenary. Mel Bochner will reprise his seminal 1969 work Measurement: Perimeter in the Wolfson Gallery. The work displays the exact measurements of the room, with a unique ’Alice’ twist, giving the

viewer a new perspective of the scale of their surroundings. The artist has entitled the piece Measurement: Eye-level Perimeter (Ask Alice) 1969/2011 especially for the exhibition.

Contemporary artists continue to take inspiration from the books, exploring ideas such as the journey from childhood to adulthood; language, meaning and nonsense; scale and perspective; and perception and reality. The photography of Anna Gaskell, alongside more recent pieces by AA Bronson, Joseph Grigely, Torsten Lauschmann, Jimmy Robert and Annelies Štrba demonstrate how the continuous revision of the form and themes within Carroll’s novels have preserved their artistic relevance.

The exhibition is curated by Christoph Benjamin Schulz with Gavin Delahunty, Head of Exhibitions & Displays, Tate Liverpool assisted by Eleanor Clayton. Accompanying the exhibition will be a full colour publication with contributions by Dame Gillian Beer, Carol Mavor, Christoph Benjamin Schulz, Edward Wakeling and Alberto Manguel. The exhibition will tour to MART - the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto, Italy from 25 February - 3 June 2012.

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