Steve Garside is an artist, designer, published poet, photographer and filmmaker from Rochdale, Lancashire, England. He studied social sciences at the University of Manchester, England.

 

Das Auge I'm Eis came about as a result of an invite to be guest photographer at the Ludwig Maximillan University in Munich. The combination of Dachau being in close proximity to Munich, an introduction to Wagner's 'Das Rheingold', and being in a city unfamiliar to me provided the elements, which led to the poem and photographs. In essence, the exhibition is about a journey and trying to communicate through images and words how that felt.

Steve Garside

 

This cross-media exhibition in the neo Bolton artist space on Corporation Street has made its bold mark in Bolton’s busy shopping streets and market area. As an artist he has not shied away from the cruel realities of his subject, instead he has carefully harvested ideas from a trip to the site of the first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Germany this January and presented them here as only he knows how.

 

It was a visit that found the artist alone in a modern German winter with the themes of travel, modern culture and even a night of classical music vying with the central theme of the preserved camp. However, he has brought home much more than the memories, which maybe seep mostly into his narrative poem, published in a book with his Dachau images. His ideas also solidify in the form of a short film, set to an infectious slow beat, which is inescapable as the viewer navigates the images on the walls and in the film. There is also an assemblage of found natural objects from the camp, which make a discrete and bleak centrepiece.

 

Mr Garside has filled his pockets with powerful elements from the whole of his trip to Germany and openly laid them before us like an inmate emptying his pockets. The backbone of the exhibition, the images from Dachau, are not a mere pictorial record or travelogue but have an intentional blurring of purpose and loss of focus. They possess the ability to look back to the 1940’s whilst remaining current. The string of images, pegged to a line running round the room like a neighbours washing beckon more than and glance and are open to multiple interpretations, a dream, a journey, a storyboard, a flash-back.

 

Frames in the time line are missing. People are missing…

 

Review – Winston Plowes

 

On the cackling screen, the film again,

The poplars dwarfed by those outside,

At this moment I think of you,

In the dark of the light, in the dark

 

Let me place your smile

In my pocket and treasure it

Like a secret crust,

 

Let me feel your words,

Your coast, your warmth,

Your truth, your lies;

The stones of your ground,

 

Let me kiss the place

Where your heart beats

And call it home.

 

(From Steve Garside’s narrative poem)

 

Steve Garside's work is marked by an impressive seriousness that understands the edges of human experience and can work them into memorable, convincing images. He has a sharp eye and an equally sharp ear for the noise of the world.
 

George Szirtes

 

Das Auge Im Eis and His first collection, A Million Ways To Measure The Sun are both available from lulu.com