Strelnikov’s Glasses and Other Stories is an exhibition at prominent Manchester cultural centre, Home. The show is the third project to be curated by the Society of Spectacles, a collective of artists interested in the cultural role played by eyewear, and specifically looks at the history of glasses in cinema.
Twenty-four artists, designers and film makers have contributed works in the format of a 27” x 40” film poster that respond to a pair of glasses in a film. Some of the artists collaborated with specialist frame makers General Eyewear, which supplies bespoke glasses to the film industry, on their pieces.
The Society of the Spectacles founder, writer and lecturer at Manchester School of Art, Robert Hamilton presents The Personal Life Is Dead. This details a gentle and witty email correspondence between himself and Sir Tom Courtenay enquiring about any recollection the latter had of the glasses he wore to emerge as the character Strelnikov in David Lean’s 1965 epic Dr Zhivago.
Fellow curator Susan Platt choose to examine the role of glasses in defining women’s characters in film over a 75-year timespan in a work entitled Never Make Passes? – for all the girls who wear glasses.
Sourcing glasses from General Eyewear’s archive, she takes the viewer from spinster aunt Miss Charlotte Vale (from the film Now Voyager) to LA gallery owner Susan Morrow (from the film Nocturnal Animals) via librarians, writers, artists, doctors, social outcasts and fashionistas.
Elsewhere the exhibition mixes serious work, like filmmaker Humberto Velez recreating the famous image of Malcolm X after his assassination, with more humorous pieces including Ian Anderson’s Warhol influenced James Bond in Four Eyes Only.
Strelnikov’s Glasses and Other Stories is on at the Granada Foundation Galleries, 1st & 2nd floors, Home Manchester until October 29.