ARTISTS TALKING

Developing a process of collaboration where authorship is collectively accredited, utk artists Liz Hall, Tony Kemplen, Jane Mellor and Bev Stout have installed six new works in Sheffield’s Graves Art Gallery, home of the city’s fine art collection.

This exhibition of two video installations and four interventions, developed in response to the gallery’s standing collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, and inhabits an unstable world of frustrated expectations. Personal or global, this uncertainty is now part of our collective experience where assumed outcomes of everyday events are subverted by unforeseen chance acts.

When, we are asked, does the safe become unsafe? When arrows breach the gallery wall, or crockery precariously tips in suspended descent, or when the quiet of historic interiors and landscapes are taken into the noise of a light-effused outer world. Primed with the clatter of breaking plates in the video installation Spin, we experience this fall in abeyance. Privy to neither cause nor effect, these works operate amongst the abstract relations of action and rest.

Moving from the unfortunate to the disturbing, Viewpoint stands between two painted interiors. Consisting of two MDF towers, surveillance cameras and two monitors, each tower is constructed in proportions resembling the Twin Towers and contains the window from its partnered painting. Seen in reverse, this view of doubling is redoubled as the monitors return the interiors to their original orientation. The viewer, unwittingly caught by this deuce, turns from spectator into voyeur.

The video installation Limelight shares the hubris of the exhibition title. The comical attempts of a clockwork chicken to enter a spotlight are redolent with the precariousness of fame as the thwarted toy fails to achieve its aim. Between levity and presage, utk’s polished works penetrate the gallery in gentle repost to the absurdity of a constant sequential effect.