- Venue
- Project Space Leeds
- Location
- Yorkshire
For three months PSL (Project Space Leeds) will be showing a collaborative project between a group of Leeds-based and London-based artists, invited by PSL and the Whitechapel Gallery, London to engage in a creative dialogue. The curators are aiming to create a bridge between the ‘195 miles’ from Leeds to London in four collaborative works of art. The artists began conversing in November 2008, the project was launched on December 13thand the work will develop in the project space until the end of February. The mission of PSL is not to adhere to conventional notions of presenting exhibitions in a gallery space but instead to allow projects to develop in an artist-led manner and ‘195 Miles’ is no exception. The aim of this experimentis to enable artists to explore their working methods in a project-space, rather than exhibit an end product of their process, and for visitors of PSL to witness this. I went along to the launch in December and then a month later to see what shape the progress of the collaboration had taken.
The haze, the smell and the noise in the large warehouse-like space struck me immediately at the launch. To enter one passes between the piece‘Radio Leeds and Radio London’ by Amy Stephens and Rory Macbeth – two radios placed either side of the entrance, one playing a Leeds radio station and the other playing a London radio station. The simplicity of this did not detract from its impact – Leeds and London are directly brought together through sound and the visitor that passes between the clashing, simultaneous play of popsongs/djs/news reports bridges the gap between the radio waves and the citiesthey originate in as the receiver of the un-harmonious noise. The collaboration between Stephens and Macbeth was the most obvious amongst the four groupings of artists for the project and only this particular piece overtly engages with the physical cities, Leeds and London. Their other pieces consisted (on both occasions I visited) of objects, mostly made from wood, with apparently un-related titles (except for ‘Box with bird 24’, which was a box. And a woodenbird) such as two painted items – a palette and a banister – entitled ‘Flute’. I reached into the depths of my inner art-appreciator and tried to find some connection between the objects, their titles and the concept of the 195 miles between Leeds and London. My mind remains open so if the artists or any one else has an explanation as to what I was looking at I am willing to hear it, as I could find nothing in the project space that could be considered a clue. The accompanying leaflet tells me that the artists use found objects – clearly –and employs the words ‘surreal’ and ‘poetic’ in describing the assemblages but this was less than mildly enlightening.
The smell came from the hay and an actual live horse that JanisRafailidou installed into the space – the latter for the launch only, for any concerned about the animal’s welfare. Rafailidou created an enclosed space made from hay bales for a film projection: ‘2775 Miles’. This piece engages with the journey of immigrants from east to west and the nature of how this story can be told. The film is repeated and appears to only be a fragment of a larger picture – the artist’s voice over tells us what we see is not a documentary and is as much about what we see as what we don’t. She engages with the culturaland social conventions in Greece and Pakistan that dictate certain spatial dynamics and specific movements of people. The smell of the hay is extremely evocative and its significance lies in this stories origin, a horse-riding club. Both aspects remind the viewer that through the art-process and artwork we can only ever gain access to a fraction of the artist’s experience. Some experiences are portrayed clearly and open up a new world to the innocent visitor (as with Rafailidou’s piece) whilst others remain closed and some what baffling. This was slightly the case with the artist Rafailidou had been placedin collaboration with, Noah Sherwood. The sculptures – ‘Light Republic’ and ‘Florentine’ – created from wooden planks and stained various colours, also engage with the notion of ‘space’ – as sculptures unavoidably do – but I found Sherwood’s two pieces less accessible as they lack a narrative and remain just as objects in a gallery. They lack a visible process that this project aims to deliver. I was also confused as to its relationship with Rafailidou’s work –how are we supposed to view the pieces together when they have no obvious relationship?
I ought to mention the haze that engulfed most of the works during the launch event and the work that it appeared to be emerging from. The piece ‘Provisional Mechanism (The Way Things Blow)’ by Matt&Ross (an East London duo) and Dave Ronalds (a founder of the Leeds collective Black Dogs) consists of a fax machine placed high up near the ceiling, lights, a smoke machine(hence the haze), a fan and paper. As the fax machine spat out paper from aboveit slowly floated down, the fan blew it around from the ground, battling to keep the paper up. True to the accompanying text, this work suggested creative potential in the otherwise mundane activity of sending a fax or using a fan.The obscure placing of the fax machine and inevitable fall of the paper madethis act playful and comical but I’m still not sure the relevance of the smokemachine other than its addition to the atmosphere, hanging in the space.
Lizzie Hughes’s works ‘Untitled (Translation Piece)’ and ‘LHR – LHR (394hrs, 40 mins) engage with the process of exploring time/journeys/space indifferent ways but are both presented as text pieces. The former is made up ofa series of books laid open on a shelf with a text in English and then a textin a different language (possibly Welsh but there was no clear indication) on the opposite side. The English version varies slightly from book to book so as each one along the shelf is observed the viewer becomes engaged in the flexible nature of language during the process of translation. The latter consists of a list of the destination, date, day, distance, duration, mode of transport, and food received on each trip made in 394 hours and 40 minutes from the 5thNovember to the 21st November 2008. There is no information whether these were actual or imagined aeroplane journeys by the artist or why they were taken, if at all. It does however map excessive movement around the world, reducing it to a few pages of A4 paper. Similarly, ‘4007 Horizons’ – a 2 minute40 second looped video of exactly that – demonstrates how photography has enabled us to reduce the experience of travelling abroad into one image – the sunset, an image inescapably associated with holidays. The viewer is taken on a roller coaster of excessive images, each one beautiful, mesmerising so that the screen becomes addictive to look at, which I did until I felt dizzy and had to stumble out into the bright, freezing project space and din of multiple radios. Again, I failed to understand how Hughes works relate to her collaborative partner’s, Nick Cass, or how Cass’s work related to the space. ‘UntitledDrawing (After Vredeman)’ is a large shape of fablon stuck onto one of the walls, luckily hidden around the corner so as not to immediately over-bear the space. Vredeman was a Dutch Renaissance architect and engineer but in light of discovering this information on Wikipedia, the work has gained no great significance in retrospect.
Since this project has been on going I imagine the works have changed or developed since I visited the space. But I wonder, will the public also witness and get to share in the exciting process of the artist’s work that PSL bases its ethos on by visiting a gallery (that is almost hidden among high-rise offices along the canal in a not overly bustling area of Leeds) more than once?
