Astro Raggi: Megan Broadmeadow

ASTRO RAGGI

MEGAN BROADMEADOW

11 November 2016 – 7 January 2017

Preview: Thursday 10 November, 6–8pm

A new commission will bring the bright lights, shimmering costumes, and altered states of the disco into Plymouth Arts Centre this winter. Artist Megan Broadmeadow’s solo exhibition Astro Raggi will illuminate the galleries as she takes us inside the mind and machines of Pasquale Quadri, the Italian inventor who revolutionized the world of disco lighting from his mother’s kitchen table.

Welsh artist Megan Broadmeadow lives and works in Bristol. Her immersive installations and sculptural work include combinations of videos, lights and illusions. A graduate of The Slade and Goldsmiths College, she was awarded the 2015-16 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award.

In this show, Broadmeadow’s installation of sculptural and video works is inspired by disco lights such as the Astro Raggi, which was one of the first to synchronise to rhythms with its extravagant multi-coloured beams, bringing a new kind of drama to dancefloors across the world. Astro Raggi explores the relationship between one man and his lights. A quiet man, Pasquale took his knowledge of lenses from working as a cinema projectionist and combined it with an aptitude for mechanical movement. It is recorded that during the early years his mother would sit in the family kitchen and help by sticking mirrors onto the lights. Plymouth Arts Centre’s Artistic Director, Ben Borthwick, says, ‘In the two years since we commissioned Megan Broadmeadow's exhibition, her practice and profile have rapidly developed through a number of other projects. This kind of long engagement with an artist's practice is central to Plymouth Arts Centre's ethos, allowing ideas to develop in unexpected directions. Astro Raggi will be Broadmeadow’s first exhibition in a public institution and continues her rumination on the morphing of bodies and technology, minds and myth through bright colours, heavy basslines and chimeric costumes.’

Astro Raggi is the final show in Plymouth Arts Centre's 2016 exhibition programme, which is dedicated to female artists and curators. It launched with the group exhibition The First Humans curated by Angela Kingston and has included solo exhibitions by Cardiff-based Kelly Best and artist/poet Heather Phillipson. Following Katya Sander’s Publicness the year-long programme closes with this new commission by Megan Broadmeadow.

The preview of Astro Raggi will be on Thursday 10 November, 6–8pm (preceded by the exhibition launch of Claire Hooper’s solo exhibition in The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, 5–6.30pm).

Megan Broadmeadow will give a talk at Plymouth College of Art on Wednesday 23 November, 5.30–6.30pm (free). This talk has been programmed in partnership with The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art’s Moving Image Season.

Astro Raggi has been supported by The Elephant Trust.