The Artist and the City | The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and AirSpace Gallery | Stoke-on-Trent11/13/2014
0 Comments
The Artist and the City at AirSpace Gallery (Stoke-on-Trent) 31st October - 13th December, 2014 Through a series of exciting new commissions, AirSpace Gallery presents a group exhibition, which seeks to propose and imagine what a future Artcity may look like - exploring the city as a viable site for artistic endeavour, but also as a place where artists can live, work and prosper. AirSpace Gallery has worked with David Bethell, Adam James, Carla Wright and Sophie Bard to put together a series of exciting and dynamic installations, artworks and activities which imagine a future art city; how it looks, smells, feels and what takes place there. Adam James The Checkerboard Crew (2014) Video (10 minutes) Pervasive Larps, are a type of game in which the world and all its inhabitants are treated as unwitting players and stages for roaming immersive storytelling. The film presented in this show, is the documentation of an immersive Larp called ‘The Checkerboard Crew’ played in an enclosed brownfield area of Stoke. Originally conceived as a Larp game to be run in a hip area of East London, it has subsequently taken on a life of its own, having been replayed across Europe. With each new iteration maintaining the core rules and concepts, the characters and fiction are adapted to suit the location. Here, participants seek to imagine what a future city may look like; exploring the city’s unlocked potential through the artistic endeavours of a group of strange silent travellers with the gift of foresight. The night vision footage depicts players using a variety of improvisational techniques to explore Stoke by Night in a quest to reimagine underused, dormant and derelict spaces. Working collectively, players used characters created in intensive workshops to reinterpret the world around them. Players were tasked with leaving behind marks, physical or embodied, which might serve as beacons to a brighter future. In order to refrain from overly analytical approaches to the task, play was conducted almost entirely in silence. The two most important rules of the game were: 1) To transform the quality of ‘the thing’. 2) A collective consensus must always be reached. London artist, Adam James’ practice, working across film and performance, has developed from an on-going interest into ‘outsiderness’, specifically the social and cultural characteristics of outsiders, concentratin on an exploration into the use of role-play (specifically Live Action Role Play or Larping), improvisation and game mechanics as a means to generate choreographic content, with the aim to better understand personal, social and cultural constructs. mradamjames.com/ |
Peter Jacobs
Performer, model, art participant, dance reviewer, blogger, wannabe performance artist, visual and performative arts fan - oh and there's a day job. Archives
July 2021
Categories
All
|