NEWS
Stephen Riley - Witnessing and Recording, Bruton Museum
New Exhibition!!
Witnessing and Recording - a solo exhibition of photographs by Stephen Riley at Bruton Museum
I am delighted to announce that I have just installed a new exhibition at Bruton Museum. For a few weeks, I will be taking my place next to prehistoric and medieval artefacts, as well as mementoes from John Steinbeck's year-long sojourn in the town in the 1950s.
The show runs from 9 June - 31 July 2026. Please see the museum's website for opening times. The following show statement explains the themes of the exhibition.
“Fundamentally, I am interested in what people do, the traces they leave behind.
Joseph Beuys argued that ‘everyone is an artist’, meaning (I believe) that, while we only apply that term to the small minority who consciously create ‘art’, everyone engages in creative acts of some kind. And given that only a tiny proportion of what people create ends up in an art gallery, Richard Wentworth’s view, that ‘the best sculptures are on the street’, makes sense.
The street is packed with the creativity of approved corporate designers – architects, traffic engineers, photographers, fashion and graphic designers – to the point where city centres are overloaded with visual and textual appeals for our attention. But the work of those not approved also features. Private individuals express themselves anonymously: their desires, joy, grief, creativity, humour, anger and alienation. Similarly, modest efforts to solve problems or scratch a living proliferate. While it is the business of corporate advertisers to create myths, these anonymous actors intervene and customise, natural processes modify, and sometimes the compression of so much material into finite space produces unintended consequences: preposterous juxtapositions occur; time passes, masks slip and the once-fashionable is revealed as kitsch (before bouncing back as ‘retro’ or ‘pastiche’); functional objects turn into artworks when modified by light, context and the frame. Sometimes it is simply the essential weirdness of what we surround ourselves with that catches the eye.
These are the things I scoop up into the camera and that inform my paintings.
There are various sub-topics in what I do, and this exhibition will feature a separate section on vehicles. Little in our world is more mythologised than cars and motorbikes. They are presented as magical objects, gleaming sculptures which will transform our lives and possibly even our sexual powers. I am therefore interested in the ‘other’ lives of vehicles: when they are modified, disdained and abused.”
The show runs from 9 June - 31 July 2026. Please see the museum's website for opening times. The following show statement explains the themes of the exhibition.
“Fundamentally, I am interested in what people do, the traces they leave behind.
Joseph Beuys argued that ‘everyone is an artist’, meaning (I believe) that, while we only apply that term to the small minority who consciously create ‘art’, everyone engages in creative acts of some kind. And given that only a tiny proportion of what people create ends up in an art gallery, Richard Wentworth’s view, that ‘the best sculptures are on the street’, makes sense.
The street is packed with the creativity of approved corporate designers – architects, traffic engineers, photographers, fashion and graphic designers – to the point where city centres are overloaded with visual and textual appeals for our attention. But the work of those not approved also features. Private individuals express themselves anonymously: their desires, joy, grief, creativity, humour, anger and alienation. Similarly, modest efforts to solve problems or scratch a living proliferate. While it is the business of corporate advertisers to create myths, these anonymous actors intervene and customise, natural processes modify, and sometimes the compression of so much material into finite space produces unintended consequences: preposterous juxtapositions occur; time passes, masks slip and the once-fashionable is revealed as kitsch (before bouncing back as ‘retro’ or ‘pastiche’); functional objects turn into artworks when modified by light, context and the frame. Sometimes it is simply the essential weirdness of what we surround ourselves with that catches the eye.
These are the things I scoop up into the camera and that inform my paintings.
There are various sub-topics in what I do, and this exhibition will feature a separate section on vehicles. Little in our world is more mythologised than cars and motorbikes. They are presented as magical objects, gleaming sculptures which will transform our lives and possibly even our sexual powers. I am therefore interested in the ‘other’ lives of vehicles: when they are modified, disdained and abused.”