Empty Shops Project

MELYN Exhibition Profile

Saturday 7th August - Friday 27th August

Title: Orange Car

Artist: Anna Bush Crews

You are invited to see 68 photographs of a very particular car, a 1978 orange Volvo. The Volvo’s driver and photographer pose with the car in some photographs. The photographs are shot on medium format and colour negative film. Along with the car are trees/flowers, cathedrals, famous buildings, ancient sites, haystacks, houses and other rural and urban manmade landscapes. The photographs are in Southern England with a couple in Wales, Lincolnshire and Norfolk.

The car is relative to its surroundings: the colour, light, season, cultural significance, legal constraints and controls, car hierarchies. The car is also considered as status symbol, as fashion accessory, as gendered, and as a means of transport. Levels of impermanence are contrasted, the car itself as a reminder in the lack of respect it increasingly commands with age, that this happens to people as well as cars. The car’s journey is a one-way street and it ends in the scrapyard. Received and observed wisdom is questioned through coincidence.

Car photographs were exhibited at the Watershed in Bristol and the Bath Fringe Festival at Sydney Place in Bath in the late 1980s (both shows in black & white). More recent exhibitions at Howard Gardens Gallery in Cardiff, the Hot Bath Gallery in Bath, the Watershed in Bristol, and …trashed…, recently shown with the empty shops project, Upper Dock Street, have not included the car.