Many & Beautiful Things

Paris-based Binelde Hyrcan’s projected video work Cambeck shows four young boys on an Angolan beach who strive for the ‘good life’, mimicking adult concepts of wealth and success.Through their naïve and ingenious game, driving in a limousine made of sand, we hear them voice their dreams and vision of the world, with a playful, swaggering confidence.

Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s series of seven portraits show the transition over a three-year period of a young man to adulthood. Dijkstra photographed Olivier as he passed though military training with the Foreign Legion, each image recording a systematic hardening of his bearing with the realisation that he has acquired authority, responsibility, and that death is very much a reality.

Olivier Silva, The Foreign Legion is presented from the collection of Mr and Mrs Nicolas Cattelain (Tate Americas Foundation) 2015

London-based Melanie Manchot’s series of short films is a study of a girl growing into a young woman. Manchot filmed her daughter with Super 8 for a minute each month from the age of 11 to 18 years. Presented on nine monitors, we see in 11/18 the silent and gradual change in her appearance, and her ways of relating to the camera, to her mother and to the world.

Joseph Szabo was a young high-school teacher struggling to connect with his students, so he suggested he photograph them in class and later, as trust grew, they invited him to their hang outs. The photographs are an evocation of 1970s America, and yet there is something timeless and compelling about Szabo’s portrayal of the universal teenager.

Santiago Mostyn’s All Most Heaven uses photography, video and text as a journal of when he fell in with a group in the New York underground scene and, out of discussions at their shared houses and dumpster dinners, they developed an idea to build rafts and navigate them down the Mississippi. The documentation of these trips is an intimate, intense celebration of those nomadic relationships.

Third year photography student Catie Close presents work from her ongoing series, California Roll, somersaulting in the landscape as a return to the playful innocence of childhood. A representation of the hazy memories we can’t always grasp.

Artist Naomi Frears has created a new work confessing the incidents and thoughts that mortified her with shame and embarrassment as a teenager, but which as time passes, have faded to mild amusement.

Lulu Freeman & Nadja Redman, third year film students, present Turned 18, a frenetic four-minute film telling everything they did in their first year of university, before it’s forgotten, before they move on.

Housework (Press) has created a riso print for the exhibition with a found photo of a young man cliff jumping, captured in a falling Icarus pose.

James Loraine-Smith has signpainted onto the gallery wall the fragment of Sappho’s poetry, translated by Anne Carson, that gives the exhibition its title.

Writer and performer Callum Mitchell has created a library of novels that echo the themes of the exhibition; a space in the exhibition for discovering of other voices charting adolescence.
Callum Mitchell’s Library for Many & Beautiful Things

Lucy Willow presents At Sea Again, a memorial artwork to Jack Perry (02/11/90 – 19/08/06). The short film depicts the scattering of ashes off the coast of Cornwall on the tenth anniversary of his death.

Young People Cornwall, with photographer Colin Robins, used medium format cameras to take portraits of Camborne and Redruth residents, and present a selection of images of their peers.

#ManyAndBeautifulThings