Two is One, One is None

August 2009

For Back Lane West’s inaugural show Two is One, One is None, three artists have each chosen an artist to join forces with to produce new work in a fast and immediate manner. Patrick Lowry, Steven Paige and Alison Sharkey have chosen to work with Ben Rowe, Clare Thornton and Alex Schady respectively.

The work being produced is a spontaneous and immediate reaction to the act of partnering and negotiation. Without much preamble the focus has been on making work, without any over arching theme or curatorial line. What is a concern are the practicalities of making work, having somewhere to show it and the relations that can make this happen. Part experiment and part challenge the results are as much a dialogue between the participants as pieces of work.

Back Lane West, is a newly initiated space/place/repository, whose vision is to host and present national and international artists’ works and projects in Cornwall, UK, and reverse this relationship to work nationally and internationally. Its mission is to enable artists to present and exhibit their work and projects to their peers and chosen audience. The potential uses of the existing project space are not limited and a variety of outcomes and events are planned for the foreseeable future, including invited artists, residency programmes, artists¹ talks and exchanges. Back Lane West is currently self-funded, being flexible in how it programmes and presents projects. In the first show the three founding members were working with artists based in Bristol and London to collaborate and create work.

The results of this endeavour was exhibited in the project space Sat 29 and Sunday 30 August 2009.
There was an artist discussion chaired by Megan Wakefield on Sunday 30th.

Artists:
Patrick Lowry = Ben Rowe
Steven Paige = Clare Thornton
Alison Sharkey = Alex Schady

Review from artcornwall.org:

“Three artists based in Cornwall paired up with three others from London and Bristol to create a show for a weekend in a new exhibition space in Redruth.

‘Expedient Exchange No.6: Rock Paper Scissors Classic Form with The Lizard-Spock Expansion’ was the elaborate title of an installation structured around a video of the two artists, Steven Paige and Claire Thornton, sitting in a field playing a Star Trek-themed variant of the traditional hand-game. In this version ‘Lizard’ and ‘Spock’ are added as two more ‘weapons’ to the armory of the two players. An artist-made leaflet containing the ‘resolution diagram’ was available for visitors, and this was augmented by an audio description of the game taken from wikipedia.

Alison Sharkey and Alex Schady had worked together in making a video in an abandoned clay-pit near St Austell. Showing on a monitor high on the wall were long lingering shots of white, crystalline sculptures drifting across a lake, startlingly jump-cut with raucously incongruous images of a steamy sport’s changing room. Edited and shown as Schady’s work, Sharkey contributed a text written in response that read as a story or narrative and was exhibited as a scrolling video projection.

Patrick Lowry and Ben Rowe did not appear to have collaborated to the same degree, yet they are two sculptors whose work has much in common. Rowe’s work was more prominent: a desk-fan and power socket made out of MDF and installed as if part of the buildings fixtures and fittings. Rather than being made from scratch, Lowry’s blue door blended into its surroundings more perfectly, as it was constructed from prefabricated components. Like Rowe’s work it was, however, a functionless art object intended for contemplation rather than use.”

Links:
www.axisweb.org/patricklowry
www.stevenpaige.com
www.benrowe.org
www.alisonsharkey.com
www.animateprojects.org/films/by_artist/s/a_schady
www.clare-thornton.blogspot.com