Judy Rogers Quick Quick Slow Exhibition

Looking at slow art in the age of speed.

Quick Quick Slow is the rhythm of many dances from Latin to Hungarian folk. The speed can differ, but the rhythm is the same (Salsa is quicker than Rumba, the slowest of all the Latin dances). We can have no meaningful experience of slowness, cannot grasp it, without a sense of how fast feels. In dance the two quick moves lead you to a slow pace when you have time to turn or to do something great, exhilarating, to change directions or partners.

"I do a lot of things in quick tempo to allow me to have a slow cadence to make art."

Judy Rogers’ work is created very slowly and deliberately. For her the act of creating art is both meditation and devotion. Her artworks wait mutely for the viewer to animate them. Observed over time, paintings behave like slow-motion moving pictures. The audience performs artworks, as though they were musical scores. It becomes a dynamic, intimate encounter between object and observer. Slow art tests the limits of our attentiveness.

"Art has to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of destruction." - Saul Bellow

You are invited to her Slow Art exhibition; five pre-selected works offered to view for between five and ten minutes. Slow art is not a thing but an experience, an on-going conversation between artwork and spectator.

Why does this matter? Carl Honoré claims that slowness is "about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savouring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them." Researchers writing in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts in 2017 found that visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago spent an average of 28.63 seconds looking at artworks. That’s an average increase of 0.089375 seconds year-on-year since 2001, when, according to previous findings, visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York spent 27.2 seconds looking at ‘great works of art’. So, come visit the gallery, slow down and look. It is when you pass the 28.63-second mark that things really start to happen.

Mixed media and watercolour paintings.