Postgraduate students celebrate artistic success

The innovative show, entitled Waste-lands, is open to the public on Wednesday 5 September between 10am-4pm at the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, in Broadcasting Place, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds.

Course Leader Peter Lewis said the event showcases 45 weeks' worth of intensive work by the Contemporary Arts and Graphic Design students, resulting in a mix of projects ranging from original art, to illustrations to interactive art and video art.

He commented: "The standard of work from this year's postgraduate students is second to none and this exhibition is a platform for them to show their art not just to members of the public, but to people within the art industry.

"The exhibition is named after T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Wasteland', adding a hyphen and plural form to make 'Waste-lands'. This derives from the sense of Eliot's poem that virtue and terror are subliminal, embracing violence and beauty and constituting the birth of the modern."

Art exhibited includes postgraduate student Layla Rassouli, who chose photography as her art medium for the Waste-lands show. Investigating examples of war photography and how the images are delimited by a "representative historical amnesia", her photographs are controlled by the intention not to let the aesthetic slip into ideology. Other students have used digital printing to produce paintings that examine contradictions of surface and subject, and there are curated projects installed that were held at Leeds Art Gallery and at Littoral Arts Trust in Cumbria that examined ethics in how art is reproduced, or how re-presentations of art history can make new performance based works.

The Waste-lands exhibition is on display in the 1st and 2nd floor studios of Broadcasting Place's, B Building, Woodhouse Lane, LS2 9EN.