Initially conceived as a counter to the predominance of London-based artists involved in open submission projects such as New Contemporaries, Immediate aims to showcase the wealth of new artistic talent currently active within the northern regions. The exhibition is selected from open submission and comprises existing and specially commissioned works. The group exhibition will take place both in Site Gallery and in an off-site venue in Sheffield and will also include commissions for Site’s projection window.
Selectors of existing work: Ben Cook (Director, Lux), Tom Morton & Catharine Patha (independent curators) and Rosalind Nashashibi (artist and winner of Becks’ Futures 2003). Selectors of commissions: Frances Hegarty, Andrew Stones (artists).
Exhibiting Artists: Stella Capes, Robin Close, James Connelly, Jason Dee, Anna Harrison, Holden & Dunbar, Ho Ming Kuei, Eleanor Morgan, David Picard, Megan Smith, Allsopp & Weir, Katy Woods, Paul Bloomfield, Rose Butler & Kypros Kyprianou, Allen Coombs, Nisha Duggal, Steven Gray, Anthony Hall, Maud Haya Baviera, Esther Johnson, Ben Jones, Steve Monger, Adam O’Meara and Prevett & McArthur
Existing works:
Stella Capes’s video piece presents a pared down clown performance, minus costume and props and offers a melancholic yet hopefully articulation of an attempt to succeed in a futile endeavour.
Robin Close’s work tests out the limits of social convention in a situation where extremity is fast becoming widely acceptable.
James Connelly presents a passport drawing booth, in which people can have a portrait drawing done in exchange for telling a story, joke or singing a song.
Jason Dee’s digitally animated video splices found film scenes together in a hybrid combination of still and moving imagery, drawing attention to the normally fluid cinematic apparatus.
Anna Harrison’s interest in cultural looping is apparent in her video piece All That Far From Heaven Allows, which samples and reworks the last scene from Todd Haynes’ film Far from Heaven which in itself is a loose remake of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows.
Holden & Dunbar’s film The Colour of Dreams references film noir to depict a man’s search of San Francisco for the red man who appears in his nightmares.
Ho Ming Kuei‘s videos of low-fi model towering infernos with no indication of scale rely on the viewer’s knowledge of images from TV news to react to the disastrous action.
Eleanor Morgan’s video involves the viewer in an endless looped staring match with a squirrel.
David Picard’s Red Traktor is a continuous loop, creating a space of reflection in which nature is challenged by the practice of cultivation.
Megan Smith’s video installation of herself skating on a frozen river, projected onto a curved wall, produces an effect reminiscent of following your shadow in the afternoon.
Allsopp & Weir’s And While We Were on Air produces stuttered movement and exhaustive rhythms from edited pulses of newsreaders breath, on the brink of speech.
Katy Woods Reader depicts an unseen character searching through a microfilm reader for newspaper stories ranging from the curious to the sinister, each only glimpsed before insatiably moving on.
Commissions:
Paul Bloomfield will be producing a new work using digital animation, based on the walk cycle, one of the most basic forms of both animation and narrative convention, from Homer onwards.
Rose Butler & Kypros Kyprianou’s One Lime Street is a formalized meditation on the architecture of the famous Lloyds of London building and its exoskeleton lifts. The film follows the lifts as people enter and journey upwards and as patterns emerge the film is also manipulated to pass up or down the projection screen, echoing the movement of the lift passing between floors and causing a sensation of dislocation and vertigo.
Allen Coombs’ Spatial Absurdities explores how we abstract spatial relationships in order to express a visual scene in language. An animated scene comprising simple cardboard cut out elements will be manipulated to show every possible permutation of the spatial relationships between them, each of which is described in deadpan captions.
Nisha Duggal ‘s video work Flat like Reflections features a number of participants filmed standing alone on the empty theatre stage performing a simple hand gesture. Sampling from everyday experiences her work focuses on the banal, random and sometimes beautiful thoughts generated by life in the twenty-first century.
Steven Gray’s Hymn to Elsewhere is produced from the detritus of Hollywood, in this case, the images are of the Land of Oz, but stripped of narrative, character and guiding presence, the work surveys an unreal landscape, a spectacle which remains sensuous but always inaccessible.
Anthony Hall’s work investigates globular vibration and the microscopic details of vibration induced flow, droplet generation and standing wave formation. Hall’s work experiments with his coffee cup oscillator so the detail of the surface is relayed & projected.
Maud Haya Baviera will produce a series of photographs born from a fascination with out-of-season static caravan sites in the ‘British Riviera’ on the east coast of England, around resorts whose decaying imperial style seems to cling hopelessly to a deserted coast.
Esther Johnson’s Playback started out as an experiment into recording the movements of Sheffield in one 360° pan, from a high angle above the city, over 24 hours. The loop nature of the work strives to capture moments of the everyday through time-lapsed detail. Subtle and bold changes in light and weather are juxtaposed against a textured soundtrack of the sonic space of Sheffield; from night-life fighting to newspaper sellers and daily flux.
Ben Jones’s Square Leg, is a film based on local Sheffield residents’ memories of their reactions to Barry Hines disturbing drama-documentary ‘Threads’, portraying the effects of nuclear war on everyday people in Sheffield and South Yorkshire, which was screened by the BBC in 1985.
Steve Monger’s video works take the viewer from a blank screen into a scale stage set of a gallery space. The atmosphere and lighting suggest a time outside of opening hours when the building is left quiet and the visitors have all gone home. Then the camera is allowed to explore. Through the movement of the camera the illusion of reality is built and then undermined as it travels along, revealing artworks on the wall, gallery fixtures and the building itself.
Adam O’Meara developed a series of video stills of people frozen in the act of falling. The work engages with metaphorical themes of the ‘falling down’ of the self i.e. breakdown, loss and death.
Prevett & McArthur’s Superman is dead! Long live Superman! explores the Superman through a conversation between artist and artwork. With text, still and animated photographs, the audience is drawn into the conversation that flows between street and projection screen.