6th March-1st May
Citywise Contemporary
Art Exhibition

 

 

 

Art Sheffield 2010 is the fifth so called city-wide Contemporary Art event hosted by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum. According to Katy Woods, Artistic Programme Co-ordinator at Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum, in her announcement of the event last year and as relayed on SCAF's website, the event "as it always does, will involve all the venues across the city." This made me take pause. Is Bank Street Arts not a venue? Is Cupola not a venue? What about Archipelago Works and The Workstation? Or Portland Works? What about Unit 3B or Cake Artspace? Is the Forum not a venue? And what exactly is a city-wide event: or the public realm for that matter? Why does Sheffield 10 not take place in Sheffield 10 - or Sheffield 2 or 3 or 4? Why is it restricted to a tiny part of S1?With this in mind, in late January 2010 we put out a call for local artists to get involved in a response to the main Art Sheffield event by putting on their own exhibitions at Bank Street in response to the themes, context or anything else that might motivate them to see what happens when a parallel event genuinely tries to include as many artists from the city as possible in an open curatorial platform.

It is true that the event had severe limitations: firstly, we had no budget - but some artists chose to use this as a focus for their response - in contrast to the tens of thousands of pounds of public money SCAF were given for the main event and the hundreds of thousands they have had in recent years. Secondly, we had very little time. The whole response from start to finish took place over four weeks - from open call to putting together a programme and then making work and setting up exhibitions. The results ranged from the ingenious to the ill-conceived - some exhibitions didn't work as the planned pieces could not be realised in the time available. Some were polished, others rough and ready. Finally, the participants themselves often had very different aims and intentions - how do you bring these together on a single achievable platform.

Art Sheffield 2010 - Over to You was co-ordinated through a Facebook site. Procedurally it was simplicity itself. We put out an open call to artists and held two meetings for those who responded expressing an interest. The first meeting brought along about 12 people and the group decision was to accept all proposals for exhibitions in the order they were received. Hence the parameters were established by those involved of an entirely open submission and acceptance curatorial platform.
We received up to 15 exhibitions by the deadline with further ideas emerging throughout the course of the eight weeks - altogether we staged 14 different exhibitions with many of these being modified, restaged and evolving via participation throughout the duration.
The whole concept seems to have been shrouded in a certain amount of controversy. SCAF officials, rather than embracing the dialogue, seemed at times to over react and there was a notable amount of defensiveness at what became earmarked as a centre of dissent as opposed to a critique and a questioning. It's true that the nature of the work offered critique only in the sense of a visual or artistic response rather than a coherent critical appraisal but then that was never the aim of Over To You. From the point of view of Bank Street Arts we can only gauge the response to the event by the reactions of those who took part and those who visited - we hope you enjoyed it.

Exhibitions included the following:

9 March - 19 March

utk - The Knight’s Tour; - life, a loser’s manual

A changing series of small installations constructed using a rule system based on the Knight’s Tour, which charts the 64 moves a knight can make on a chess board to land on every square once. These random formations represent different combinations of all the paraphernalia retained from past utk exhibitions, future shows and failed proposals, thus creating new work which bypasses critical or curatorial filtering.
 

9 March - 1 May

Ian Baxter - Music for Accountants

Music for Accountants is a piece of music composed by reading part of the public accounts for Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum as a musical score. This is inspired by John Cage, who created several ‘chance’ or ‘indeterminate’ pieces by deriving the musical parameters from non-musical sources. He turned flecks in a piece of paper into noteheads, or overlaid star charts onto a musical stave. For this piece, Ian has developed a set of rules which convert the expenditure categories and their monetary values into musical information. In making such a work, the composer surrenders to the music produced; personal musical taste gives way to specific details of the document. The listener is invited to scrutinise the accounting statements from an unusual standpoint and to consider that if the accounts were different, the music would be too.
 

9 March - 1 May

Trevor Tomlin - Umbrella

Trevor Tomlin's "Umbrella" highlights the value and nature of the extensive network of unofficial sites for artistic production in Sheffield (the unfunded, unfashionable, undervalued and low tech). This will be juxtaposed with the small group of funded official Art Sheffield venues and the precious world of talented, marketable individuals who are sufficiently well supported to expertly mount their formal 'fine' art exhibitions. Attention will be paid to groups/ projects that are often socially excluded from the official art establishment. Examples include 'alternative' collectives (e.g. squatted social centres), community celebratory collaborative art events (e.g. lantern making), artists initiatives using semi-derelict buildings (e.g. Departures/Sipelia Works), and LGBT Pride. The relationship between inside/outside and the nature of barriers to participation in art will be explored from the personal perspective of a participant in all of these projects.
 

12 March - 1 May

Liz Searle - Heads will Roll - Class of 2010

An interactive installation made up from discarded hairdressing heads kindly donated by Castle College. Get involved by creating your own photoshoot, deconstructing notions of fashion and beauty... and messing about!

 

9 March - 1 May

Miss Bebe Rascal - Lost and Found

parasitic by nature... read and feed off me... spread, invade this space... leave a trace of your existence... a memory you dont want forgot... things you want others to know... secrets, lies, hopes, dreams... or just your bus ticket

you will see pieces of me ... return pieces of you

an empty hole or full of existence... you decide how this exhibition grows
 

9 March - 1 May

Patrick Amber's "Catrap"

Rubbish? I don't think so. Found objects; rejected toys; broken dolls; bored games; p.c. parts; fabric scraps; novelty crap; random plastics, packaging and flouro tat; undisposed throwaway lighters; Playstation controls and other cat & mouse-shaped bits to build with. Come along and take part in creating Catrap - a self-assembly game for cats and mice, on and off the board.
 

23 March - 27 March

Containing Nature and Reversing Space

A group show by students from Sheffield Hallam University, ‘Containing Nature and Reversing Space’ is a multi sensory installation using the idea of a reversed space. The natural world, all around us, is contained, destroyed, sold, mass produced, contaminated, manipulated and in many cases taken for granted. This is particularly poignant in the busy city of Sheffield, juxtaposed with the contrasting setting of the Peak District.
Very Private View - Tuesday 23rd March

30 March - 17 April

Portland Works

A curated group exhibition designed to draw attention to the traditional skills practiced at Portland Works and the people whose livelihood depends on it continuing as a working/creative community. Portland Works is under threat of closure as one of Sheffield’s remaining small industrial works, because of plans to redevelop it as apartments and offices. This lively and diverse exhibition of art and craft is designed to engage Sheffield people in an awareness of their industrial heritage and its relevance to their lives.The exhibition blurs the boundaries between art and industry, situating the objects of production, both past and present in an art gallery context, for public viewing. It juxtaposes artefacts produced by craftspeople against artists’ responses to the objects and their environment in the form of paintings, photographs, installations, sculpture and film.

 

18 March - 1 May

Rob Brown - Mr and Mrs Andrews

Rob Brown has chosen a classic piece from the English painting tradition to playfully highlight the inequities within and outside the artworld in an installation created for the gallery which will also tour the streets of Sheffield.
 

30 March - 1 May

Nic Bate & Matt Risby - You are your own Source of Work

An installation comprising of video and sounds depicting one whole day in the working life of Portland Works. This comprises of multiple screens showing edited footage of the inhabitants of the Works; craftspeople, musicians, artists etc to portray the diversity and breadth of talent that exists there.

 

18 March - 17 April

Gary Manton - Art Sheffield 2

Art Sheffield 2 is a satirical response to Contemporary Art and its promotion and in particular to Art Sheffield 2010. Initial sketches and ideas based upon Art Sheffield publicity will be exhibited and then worked up into a full scale installation.

Gary Manton
 

16 and 17 April

Herve Perez - Resonarium

The soundtrack of your Art Sheffield experience. Musicians will explore the gallery spaces in the form of a relay, sounding out each room as they navigate the soundscape, meet various other participants and merge with the audience. Performers will be given the brief to abstract expected musical conventions and to exploit the peripheral sounds of their instruments and to interact closely with the environment: existing sounds in and around the gallery, its acoustics, artwork, audience noises etc… abstract music for abstract visual art.