Citroën Relay 1100 HDi 2.0l diesel SWB 2004 5 door
White body work, panel body
Blue carpeted interior
2 front passenger seats, 2 front facing back passenger seats
Remote central locking
electric windows
5 speed manual gearbox
100,000 miles on the clock
Ideal for touring art exhibitions
Liverpool 15.11.08, Leeds 20.11.08, Huddersfield 21.11.08, Manchester 27.11.08
Outside A Foundation, Liverpool, Saturday 15th November
Concurring with Night of the Owl, an Owl Project supported by Castlefield Gallery
Outside Leeds Art Gallery, Thursday 20th November
Concurring with Northern Art Prize
Outside Bates Mill, Huddersfield, Friday 21st November
Concurring with The Graphic Method: Bicycle part of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Outside Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, Thursday 27th November
Concurring with Laura White
Honk was the tenth show by the Manchester based artist collective Contents May Vary and the first taken on tour. The exhibition visited four established art venues in the North of England as part of Artranspennine08 and coincided with prominent contemporary art and music events.
Contents May Vary showed work produced and selected in response to the transportation and exhibition context of a white van. The artists incorporated everyday objects through animation, drawing and performance and exhibited three varied individual works with subtle commonalities.
The white van is synonymous with the transit of varied goods and materials and is a regular method of art transportation. Contents May Vary chose to exhibit within the vehicle, leaving the exhibition one step short of it's expected gallery destination.
Contents May Vary, co-founded in 2004, is Alice Bradshaw, Liz Murphy and Richard Shields. The collective organise and curate large scale group shows in diverse spaces as well as exhibit individually. They also run an independent, internationally distributed, Contents May Vary publication.
Contents May Vary are currently part of Castlefield Gallery's Project Space, a programme that supports artists through sustained periods of bespoke professional development activities, funded by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Arts Council England.
Alice Bradshaw
Brown Paper Bag Box (2008) animation, duration 15 hours
I work with a wide range of media and processes involving the manipulation of mundane objects and materials. Mass-produced, anonymous objects are often rendered dysfunctional caricatures of themselves and distinctions between the absurd and the mundane are blurred. I create or accentuate subtleties, addressing concepts of purpose and futility.
Liz Murphy
Wearing My Folex (2008) performance with Folex
Times are rough, the economy's crap and cash is short. So never has there been a better time to invest in a bargain. Go on treat yourself and maybe even pick a little something for the missus.
With special thanks to my scallies and my original Folex donator.
Richard Shields
Slurped (2008) Bic Biro on paper coffee cups with plastic lid
The focus of this investigation has been on the re-emergence of drawing in contemporary art, the partial absorption of graphic/street art into the art world/market and the conflicted slap dash approach in recent anti art manifestations.
Having abandoned drawing once myself in favour of an aesthetic more commonly found in minimal or vintage conceptual art, I have returned to the practice treating its neglect as a personal element to be considered equally with its use on used coffee cups and the disjointed narrative found in the backgrounds of the personalities depicted.
The portraits (drawn in old pens scavenged in the work place) are sourced mostly from discarded newspaper articles and glossy magazines, which detail or berate the exposure, rise and fall of themselves and or the institution to which they are connected. Other characters are nominated due to their closeness to my technical development and overall interest in realism before it was chucked.
Agyness Deyn, Ruben Rausings founder of the troubled Tetrapak packaging dynasty, Reginald Perrin, Father Clancy The Singing Priest, Max Mosley, Jay-Z at Glastonbury, Chuck Close, Rachel Goodyear, Richard Shields.
Spooning (2008) Bic Biro on wooden teaspoon
One of my early tasks in art was learning to depict an altered image thanks to the physical and material qualities of a certain type of object.
One of my later tasks in art was to question the conceptual, physical and material qualities of the same type of object, which lead to an otherwise impossible transference of the altered image.
