This year’s Secret 7” ‘Vinyl art exhibition, in support of the Amnesty International charity was held at the Sonos Recording Studio in Shoreditch London, which I had the pleasure of attending as my daughter Ella Ginn managed to get one of piece in representing the one ‘classic instrumental piece of music, which was a thrill for her as Ella is just completing her art illustration BA at Middlesex Art University. This year’s exhibition, as in the past 5 years this has been had several leading artists, whose 350 pieces of work was completely anonymously exhibited alongside some 350 artists (whose work submissions were chosen out of 10,00 applications) and also all anonymously exhibiting. The idea is that each artist can submit up to 3 pieces of art to represent one or up to 3 of the ‘7’ selected pieces of music from various music artists which this year included, Churches (Clearest Blue), Etta James (At Last), Jack Garratt (Worry), Tame Impala (The Less I Know the Better), Max Richter (Dream 3) (the classic piece), The Jam (Art Scholl) and John Lennon (Imagine).
The idea was that each piece or artwork would fit on and be part of the 7” (inch) vinyl single artwork, so each of the ‘700’ seven inch sleeves would include 100 of each of the 7 singles. Each single (artwork sleeve) was exhibited upstairs & downstairs at the Sonos studio on rack of some fifty singles circa 7 per shelf, with 7 shelves high that would have ‘no’ label, so you had to guess the music and of course the artist of each artwork was anonymous.
At the end of the exhibition, there was a chance to buy any of the singles for £50, not knowing if you bought a piece by someone like Sir Anish Kapoor, Sir Paul Smith, Jenny Holzer, George Hardie, Gavin Turk, Cheryl Dunn, Thierry Noir, Marina Willer or a an unknown artist (like Ella Ginn ;-). Of course the star artist’s work would be worth way more than the £50 purchase price, which was part of the charm of the exhibition and it’s ‘Secret’ theme. There was an on-line auction bid, thereafter for the artwork singles for those that did not sell the first day.
This was a really cool art show with an unusual twist though the odds of acceptance a challenge with only a few hundred being selected out of thousands of submissions.
Of the 700 artworks there were several with automotive themes, which I include for your interest and your guess is as good as mine, which single they were supposed to represent. One looks like a hot hatch, one looks like a Ford Capri which made me smile and one might be an Impala
