Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno has just announced the line-up of artists for its summer season and it features a range of exciting new work from Welsh and international artists.
In the new Gallery 6 space upstairs, as part of the Uprisings series, will be a debut exhibition of work by Becca Voelcker, who hails from Pant Glas, Gwynedd.
Becca uses film as a medium by which to comment on place and identity. This exhibit, Memos, was created in 2012 and uses as its focus a rusting cruise liner abandoned near Flint.
Memos includes different shots of the decaying boat, bathed in sunlight against a bright blue sky, zooming in on windows where plastic sheets flap dreamily or flights of birds alighting on its rusted deck. It is also featured as a vast bulk against the skyline seen from a passing train. .
Becca Voelcker, Memos, 2012, film still. Image courtesy of the artist.
The gallery explains Becca's work as "luxuriating in layers of association, memory and narrative, (it) points to both the significance of the moving image and its ability to recall our associations with other times and locations.
"It also demonstrates Voelcker's erudite approach to the history of cinema and, in particular, the use of film as a medium for art-making."
Memos will be shown from 20 July to 20 October 2013.
Meanwhile, in the main gallery will be a collective show, Dear Portrait, which features 20 different international artists and their take on what the contemporary portrait means.
Unlike most other portrait shows, this will offer the subjects of the paintings the chance to respond to how they have been captured in writing, providing a glimpse of the often little-known stories behind the exhibits.
Participating artists are: Nina Beier, Pierre Bismuth, Maurizio Cattelan, Tim Gardner, Loris Gr茅aud, Ryan Gander, Gareth Griffith, Isabell Heimerdinger, Carsten Holler, Annette Kelm, David Lamelas, Jessica Longmore, Jerry McMillan, Elizabeth Peyton, Laura Reeves, Wilhelm Sasnal, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mungo Thomson, Ian Wallace, Franco Vaccari.
The show includes painting, sculpture, drawing and video and has been curated by Mostyn's visual arts programme curator, Adam Carr, with the aim of enhancing understanding of the meaning of portraiture. Some exhibits take more traditional forms while others play with the limits of the genre.
At the same time the gallery is also showing solo exhibitions by the German artist Annette Kelm and the Italian artist Franco Vaccari.
Detail from Annette Kelm's, Anna #1, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist
This is the first time Kelm has exhibited in a public gallery in the UK and the Mostyn describes her photographs as merging "seemingly disparate content", shifting between various genres of photography and offering an analysis of the medium as a whole.
The Vaccari exhibition features Leave on the Walls a Photographic Trace of Your Fleeting Visit, which was created for the 1972 Venice Biennale. It is essentially a photobooth which instructed visitors to the exhibition to take photos of themselves and stick them to the wall.
He revisited the interactive concept in 2010 for the Gwangju Biennale and many of the thousands of photo strips produced in each are featured in this exhibition.
The exhibition at Mostyn also features the results Photomatic D'Italia (1972-4), where Vaccari took his concept out onto the streets of Italy, with audiences happily taking part in candid photostrips in 1,000 booths.
Franco Vaccari, 10,000 lives (detail), Gwangju Biennale, 2010. Image: P420, Bologna IT
Vaccari's work is set as a counterpoint to the Dear Portrait show at Mostyn, and explores aspects of his work on portraits and the change in human appearance.
All exhibitions run concurrently. For more information on the artists and each exhibition visit .