#s1 artspace

[brutalpark]

Football at home in Park Hill, Sheffield, 1961

[brutalpark]

Kid Acne announces exhibition at Park Hill - Exposed Magazine

Kid Acne has announced his first Sheffield show in five years with an exhibition at S1 Artspace at Park Hill..

This is probably the most significant at exhibition Park Hill has ever held.

[janefaram]

Review: Simon Bill's Irises for Our Favourite Places

A new review & interview for Our Favourite Places: Simon Bill's Irises at the Leadmill Road archways, commissioned by S1 Artspace. It's a pleasure to clap eyes on so make sure you trip down there!

Most of us know the eye trickery brought about by the ambiguous ‘rabbit-duck’, the impossible Escher staircase, and the Rubin vase... Cognitive illusions that perplex our eyes and mess with our minds because ironically, we are trying to make sense of what we’re looking at.

Continue to read!

[horriblegif]

we went to see the new exhbition of nicolas deshayes at s1 artspace in sheffield. all of the curators we follow on twitter after having snogged them at the gaucho club were posting images of it and fuck, we can’t be left out the loop or our self-esteem drops to an extreme low. problem is…. we’ve never really been outside of peckham without a minder, so we got a bit lost on the way. but we are certain the images we took are of the nicolas deshayes exhibition at s1 artspace. the press release says, and we quote: ”The exhibition Crude Oil includes five new works each displaying a form of repetition or pattern; a reference to the mechanical reproduction processes adopted by manufacturers across the world. Although Deshayes does not commonly represent the body in a figurative manner – the historical works he’s selected occupy this role and act as protagonists throughout the exhibition – the new works each suggest a relationship to the viewer’s body through subtle choices the artist has made about height, position and arrangement.” pretty sure that relates directly to the power loader from aliens and the majestic crab and also the granite and furniture stuff. we must have made it to the right place.

[doloreschamber]

Roanna Wells Q&A

Tiny black specks on vast white expanses, swirling together around empty focal points or arranged in concentrated clusters, scattering out towards the edges. In her monochrome embroideries, the artist Roanna Wells substitutes people with stitches and, in doing so, offers us stunning, and often dramatic, new perspectives on human gatherings.

Using aerial photographs of large-scale gatherings as her starting point, Roanna then deconstructs these images, doing away with everything – the built environment as well as natural structures – except the human.

To look at Roanna’s embroideries is to be left in a state of wonder, at how relatively tiny and indistinguishable we each are when seen from the air, as well as at the impact we may have on our landscape – politically, socially, and aesthetically – by connecting with others.

How would you describe your work? I describe myself as a fine artist using graphical stitch. I’ve always been reluctant to use the phrase ‘textile artist’ as I feel this brings up so many preconceived ideas about the medium, so I definitely place myself within the fine art world and the context of contemporary drawing. My work uses the mark-making quality of hand embroidery to depict detailed aspects of imagery and pattern.

What inspires you? I’m both technically and conceptually inspired as an artist, having produced work which is either purely process led and abstract and that which has a deeper sense of context either socially or politically. My most recent series of works, entitled ‘Interpersonal Spatial Arrangements’, depict abstract representations of individual human forms within crowds as seen from above. Inspiration for these are not only taken from the geographical context and current topical relevance of the image, but also the aesthetic composition of the emerging patterns.

What are you currently working on? I am currently working on a huge embroidery which will be part of the Jerwood Makers Open 2013, a funding opportunity to produce new work for an exhibition at the Jerwood Space in London in July.

This financial support allowed me to travel to India and commission specific aerial photography over the Kumbh Mela religious gathering in February this year. It is the world’s largest gathering of people and attracted over 60 million pilgrims to bathe in the Ganges over the month-long festival. My work for the Jerwood Makers will depict the crowd that gathered on the most auspicious bathing day.

What’s your desk or workspace like? I have a studio at S1 Artspace and it is on the side of the building that receives the most wonderful afternoon and evening sunlight. It’s a beautiful space that provides me a little creative haven to mix with other artists and make work. My process is very time consuming, so the light and comfort of my studio space is very important.

What do you love about Sheffield? Apart from my three years at Manchester School of Art, I have lived in Sheffield all my life and I feel so content and inspired here. The geographic nature of the city means that, even in the middle of the town centre, you feel constantly connected to the beautiful surrounding countryside just over the hill.

There is a reassuring sense of space, distance, and possibility here. I thrive on variety, and I feel that Sheffield provides a brilliant combination of vibrant ‘goings-on’, accessibility to cultural nourishment, and the space and sense of community to feel settled and at home.

What would you do to improve the city? More places to sit and have a drink that get the evening sun in the summer. A rooftop bar for all day round sunshine would be perfect!

www.roannawells.co.uk (Originally published on Our Favourite Places)

[art404notfound]

S1 Artspace (I visited over a month ago oops):

Way back last year (18th December to be exact), our tutors ushered us all onto a train to Sheffield and took us round some galleries. But we went to S1 Artspace, which I'd been meaning to visit for a while (and has been under threat of closing down for a while). They were still putting up their S1 Introducing exhibition when we visited, but I saw some interesting stuff:

These pig's trotters by Yuang Chai Wong were pretty cool. She had a bunch of stuff scattered on the floor. This is degree level work though, and I was quite surprised as it wasn't as... impressive as I thought degree level work would demand. But it's cool all the same.

I went for a wander around the studio spaces and fell in love with this one:

As soon as I saw these screens I ran timidly around with joy, there's something really satisfying about television sets, and this guy was completely on my level by the look of his studio. I've just had a quick look through the artist list, and I believe these televisions belong to Haroon Mirza. There was the cutest little tiny telly as well:

And more dismantled televisions:

I'd love to work with television sets. Maybe I should increase my knowledge of electronics - which is pretty low when it comes to hardware. These television sets in various states of dismemberment got me so excited though... I would simply love to have the facilities to work with them myself. One day eh?

[doloreschamber]

A Peculiar Form of Fiction

S1 Artspace, Sheffield

History isn’t just out there, particles of memory floating around and whispering in the ears of the present. Since a story exists only in its telling, to convey truth requires mediation. The art projected in A Peculiar Form of Fiction lies in the area between truth and telling. In these films, artists interfere with and complicate perceptions of reality and fiction, and past and present, and are all the more revealing in doing so.

The ten-hour programme, screened across a two-day schedule, is curated by directors of S1 Artspace and Site Gallery and features six artists who draw on and experiment with conventions of documentary: Jeremy Deller, Gillian Wearing, Hito Steyerl, Duncan Campbell, John Smith and Phil Collins. At its opening, the exhibition complemented the bustle around Sheffield Doc/Festwith screenings in both galleries. It continues at S1 Artspace, in a rarely used expanse beneath the gallery – a utilitarian cinema-bunker suited to films that are, for the most part, stylistically unadorned and direct.

Deller’s Battle of Orgreave supplements the straight-up historical event documentary – talking heads overlaid with sound and vision bites – with an intervention in the process of recollection. Staging a re-enactment in 2001 of the miners’ strike’s most violent clash of police and pickets, he engages those who were there during the original just 17 years earlier, as well as seasoned battle re-enactors, in a confrontation with memory and representation. Participants address the misrepresentation of the turn of events by the media at the time, and so the act of storytelling becomes one of reclaiming history. Reconstruction comes with its own complications though; with original documentation so stinted and oral accounts so multitudinous, an objective truth is inconceivable. But to some extent the film fills a void in representation. The event now has a certain duality; Googling Battle of Orgreave returns a fairly even mixture of top results referring to the original incident and to the reconstruction.

Positioning aspects of a former reality in the present can create a new kind of engagement with history. In Phil Collins’ use! value! exchange! a former Marxism-Leninism teacher from the GDR recreates a pre-1989 lesson on Das Kapital to a university class in Berlin in 2010, and that same lesson takes on a different function. In some ways it’s alienating, as both head-scratching students and the audience feel the anachronism of this scenario. Images are intercut of Marx floating through treetops on the hook of a crane, his bronze statue being relocated in 2010, underlining the point that, though interpretations of Marx assume an altered position in today’s Berlin, past forces continue to be relevant to making sense of the present.

As these films make some form of fiction out of reality, they draw attention to the processes of filmmaking and storytelling themselves; none more so than John Smith’s amusing short, The Girl Chewing Gum. An everyday scene shot in London street in 1976, Smith initially seems to control the action with voiceover commands – ‘I want the two girls to come in from the right talking to each other’, ‘put the cigarette to your mouth… good’. It becomes increasingly clear, however, that this film’s fictionality is not ‘based on’ Smith’s directions, but rather the fiction ‘is’ the directions. He begins to assign motives and characters to passers by: man has robbed the Post Office and has a revolver in his pocket, another is on his way to the bank, two little boys are being naughty. It plays on audience consciousness of the conventions of scripted film and TV – the position of the director, plotlines, character development – and raises questions about authority and authenticity in representations of reality.

Gillian Wearing’s Self-Made is perhaps the closest to the format of reality TV: its participants responded to an advert calling for people to be in a film where they could play themselves or a fictional character, and were selected through an audition process; they’re conscious of the cameras and encouraged to emotionally ‘bare all’ in front of them. Yet as they engage with their past experiences through Method acting coaching and play out personal fictions, the viewers are put in an awkward, at times voyeuristic, position. The exhibition has conditioned the audience to question representations of reality, and Self-Made has a particularly conflicting effect. Though Wearing could not have predicted the outcome, as with reality TV there is some degree of control and manipulation. The line between person and assumed character is blurred, though the latter often reveals a deeper element of truth.

A Peculiar Form of Fiction is a challenge to its visitors; most of its films are at least half an hour in length and some over an hour. But it rewards time, for while each film tells stories that are either personal or are specific aspects of a larger narrative, they reveal in their own ways something of their wider social or political context. Whether that be changes in attitude that allowed a miner’s son to break out into a cross-dressing wrestling champion (in Deller’s So Many Ways to Hurt You) or the analogising of current economic crises through a Boering 4X-JYI plane, going spare and making the transition through Hollywood set pieces to being recycled into DVDs (in Steyerl’s In Free Fall). These works of art amalgamate fiction and reality to commentate and provoke thought on history and processes of truthful representation.

A Peculiar Form Of Fiction, 14/06/2012 until 21/07/2012, 120 Trafalgar Square, Sheffield, S1 4JT. www.s1artspace.org