Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR)
Exhibition and horror symposium by MA Fine Art students: Nightmare on Elm Grove
Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:19:00 GMT
MA Fine Art students, along with internationally renowned graphic artist, Graham Humphreys, are having an exhibition of horror at The Gold Room, Room 237 in Southsea. The exhibition is entitled Nightmare on Elm Grove and is part-funded by Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR).
Graham Humphreys was the creator of the original artwork for Nightmare on Elm Street back in the 80s, along with many other artworks for horror movies of the period and more recently Tartan films. His work has graced many of the album sleeves of the pre & post Goth period and numerous music paper/magazine illustrations promotional material. Information on Graham’s work can be found at:www.grahamhumphreys.com
To celebrate Graham visiting Portsmouth the artists are also hosting a Horror Symposium at the University of Portsmouth on the afternoon of the 13th March in St George’s Building, Room 0.22. This event is open to all interested UoP students. The Symposium will include overviews of PhD students working in the horror arena of Film & TV studies, nostalgia for schlock horror and vinyl LPs by Stuart Gard, as well as a Q&A/presentation by Graham on the development of his work.
Programme
|
Time |
Activity |
Speaker |
|---|---|---|
|
1.45pm |
Arrival (St George’s Building, 0.22) |
|
|
2pm |
Welcome and Introduction to the afternoon
|
Marc Beattie (MAFA student) Dr Lincoln Geraghty (Reader in Popular Media Cultures) |
|
2.10pm |
The Visceral and The Visual |
Dr Emma Austin (Senior Lecturer in Film) |
|
2.30pm |
Paratextual Activity |
Simon Hobbs (PhD student) |
|
2.50pm |
Comfort break |
|
|
3.05pm |
Alice Cooper - Detroit’s Nightmare |
Stuart Gard (Lecturer in Art, Design & Media) |
|
3.35pm |
Q&A with images |
Graham Humphreys (Graphic Artist) |
|
4.30pm |
Close of conference |
|
Speaker information
Dr Emma Austin
The pleasures of viewing the horrific have long puzzled social commentators, leading some of them to charge horror film viewers as being somehow “different”. This talk will examine the roots of the visually horrific in horror film, focusing specifically on the emergence of Horror Effects (commonly referred to as HFX) and how these crafted visions of disgust led to moments of visual spectacle in Horror film texts. In turn, we can then theorise why these images appeal to audiences.
Umberto Eco’s notions of disjointed texts may be useful here: many horror texts are remembered for now iconic “visual icebergs”: the splinter moment in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), the “head” sequence in Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) or the ‘chest burster’ in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). What can these moments of crafted terror tell us about the time in which they were made, and why is the horror genre so important when talking about the creation of iconic images, characters and ideas?
Simon Hobbs
Within the modern media saturated world, audiences can understand cinema via a series of paratextual entities that exist outside of a films projection. Paratexts range from trailers and DVD covers to all manner of official merchandise. They represent the channel between the commercial industry of cinematic production and the consumer demographic.
These paratexts, due to their proliferation within modern culture, have the ability to alter a films understanding, adding additional levels of meaning that affect the films relationship to its consumer base. New movements in film academia have seen a growth in scholarly interest concerning paratexts. Rather than just looking at the text itself as a bearer of information and meaning, academics are beginning to note the importance of certain paratextual items in helping us understanding the role cinema plays within modern culture.
DVD sleeves are one such paratext that is fundamental in shaping the process of audience understanding of a particular narrative. Acting as the prime signifier of a films narrative image, the DVD sleeve performs a central role in motivating audience consumption by providing a series of images in which notions of pre-existing filmic knowledge and exciting variations of cinematic conventions merge to create desirable commercial artefacts.
Stuart Gard
Before golf, the fairway, before providing the music for ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, the tailfin had become a switchblade. ‘School’s Out’, the vinyl record, recreated a school desk, the first of many cultural spaces Alice constructed through the use of the album as a conceptual packaged & narrated environment. Before Freddy, before Columbine, Alice played with imaginative violence as transgression. He worked in relation to a dangerous critical edge. Now we have fluid space anything goes, everything goes. In 1972, before the graphic novel replaced music as the environment of dissent and fantasy artists such as Cooper and Bowie provided frames of escape. Billion Dollar Babies (skin as texture) Muscle of Love (schoolgirl fantasy). Before reality and unreality became interchangeable Alice enters the asylum for real then releases ‘From The Inside’. The school bus moves from LP to Postmodern Simpsons; Nightmare poster to Jefferson County tragedy. ‘School’s Out’.
From the opening of Tales from the Crypt to Batman’s Batcave (1966); from Weimar ‘Velcomes’ to the Blitz club and its offspring – Hell and the Batcave. The protected space known and experienced by the initiated has provided an architecture of self definition and critical resistance… habitation - the admission price of an album… ‘School’s Out’. Inscribed desk, white panties hiding inside. A space for boys and girls.
Graham Humphreys
Graham Humphreys was the creator of the original artwork for Nightmare on Elm Street back in the 80s, along with many other artworks for horror movies of the period and more recently Tartan films. His work has graced many of the album sleeves of the pre & post Goth period and numerous music paper/magazine illustrations promotional material.