Penny Woolcock: Fantastic Cities
6th Nov 2018
Opening on 17 November at Modern Art Oxford, Fantastic Cities is the first major art exhibition of artist and director Penny Woolcock, an unparalleled pioneer in contemporary visual culture in the UK. Woolcock, who began her artistic practice in Oxford in the 1970s, is widely celebrated for her creatively incisive approach to exploring issues of social inequality.
As well as bringing together pivotal works from the artist’s career since 2015, this exhibition will present three new moving-image commissions: When the Same Road is a Different Road (2018), a dynamic new film installation that presents the startlingly different responses of two individual narratives, one the artist and the other a young gang member, on a short walk through the same city streets; When I First Saw A Gun (2018), a honest reflections on personal gun use from a range of diverse people; and Fantastic Cities (2018), a sound and film installation interrogating the mythology of Oxford and Los Angeles, two cities famously represented by fictitious narratives created through film and literature.
Image: Penny Woolcock, Behind the scenes photo from When the Same Road is a Different Road (2018). Photo by Ravi Lloyd. Image courtesy the artist.