Site Platform offers an opportunity for artists to use the gallery space to undertake explorative, cumulative, interactive, performative, experimental, in-progress or durational work. Creating a space for artists to develop new work in the gallery setting whilst also allowing audiences to engage with the process.
James Brown
10 – 20 September 2008
Doom
James Brown will build a series of partial film sets in the Gallery of superficially domestic scenes. Each set will be fabricated to allow various forms of kinetic sequences to be staged for camera (such as a bottle of milk falling over, plaster dust falling from around a light fixture, a pen rolling off a table, a television losing its signal etc.) these actions will approximate cliché scenarios of imminent disaster as fictionalised in popular culture; specifically in Disaster genre film such as The Poseidon Adventure Earthquake Towering Inferno, and Jurassic Park.
A series of staged sequences will be filmed and transferred to custom video editing software, that will select between individual scenes to author an abortive disaster film; a fragmented narrative that is continuously threatening to escalate, but is not capable of narrative resolution. Edited sequences will be shown in Gallery 2 and on the Projection Window.
Watch an Interview with James Brown on Site Gallery’s Youtube page
Ben Cain
24 September – 4 October 2008
A Picture Walks Out of a Place, a Person Walks Into a Wall
Ben Cain developed a work which involved the space of a book, or a glossary, an A-Z, being expanded into a 3D environment in which pages become walls or doors, and printed images became video projection. The work was, in part, formed though a series of workshops during which those taking part attempted to outline the past, present, and future faces of an area, or areas of Sheffield. Using Sheffield as a starting point, outlines of a new semi-fictional place begin to emerge. The collectively developed ‘image-space’ gradually evolved into an installation involving temporary walls, digital prints and video/slide projection. The resulting construction combined the theatre stage, museum, and domestic inhabitable space, infused with some un-placeable ideology, a vernacular style connected to who knows where or when.
Whilst employing codes and symbols which recall certain types of elementary education (where a triangle recalls a hill, and a circle recalls the moon or the sun), and the idea of teaching a world-view, the work at the same time rejects the idea of definitive descriptions or representations of places/times/people.
Participants and other viewers could roam the spaces, images and texts, literally finding themselves in front of the work, in the middle of it, and behind it; as audience, subjects and producers, they merge and confuse the roles of insider and outsider, inhabitants and visitors.
Matt & Ross
8 Oct – 18 Oct 2008
Incommunicado FM
Matt & Ross transformed Site Gallery into ‘Incommunicado FM’, an in-gallery online radio station. Designed to commentate on ideas of ownership and commodity it aimed to construct a fleeting presence within Site Gallery, ultimately leaving a semi-permanent resonance throughout Sheffield over its duration and beyond.
Week one of the project was dedicated to the purchasing and online cataloguing of donated music from a selection of charity shops in Sheffield. Throughout week two the collected music acted as the soundtrack to ‘Incommunicado FM’ with the artists, guests and visitors determining each evenings play-list. Broadcasting every evening between 13th – 16th October from 9:00pm-12:00am (with a broadcast with live audience on Friday 17th – 7.30 – 10.30) each show’s content was based around music from one of the charity shops, with special guests and members of the public (via phone-in and email) being invited to share their thoughts and feelings on the acquired music and issues of both local and wider importance.
During the day members of the public were invited into the gallery space to explore the collections of music and to make requests, suggestions and contributions for that evenings show. During the evening, the gallery became a hive of activity, conversation and music, that audiences could listen to online. Once the platform reached its conclusion all the acquired music, now stamped and catalogued was re-donated back to its point of origin for re-purchasing by the public.
Watch an interview with Matt & Ross on Site Gallery’s Youtube page