2.5 Hours of Oxygen
Birmingham, 19 March 2009 11.30am-2.00pm
On Thursday March 19 a two-and-a-half hour group show, will take place in seven red K6 telephone boxes in the centre of Birmingham. The exhibition, entitled 2.5 Hours of Oxygen, will consist of diverse artistic interventions that ask what the private space of a phone box means, now that communication has become so public. Is there still a need for a place where things can be said that you don't want overheard on a bus or in a café? A place where you can be yourself, almost unobserved. The event runs for just two and half hours because according to urban myth, that's all the oxygen a telephone box can hold.
The seven phone boxes are sited centrally on Victoria Square, Temple Row and Eden Place and artists will be using them from 11.30am to 2.00pm.
The 7 artists include:
Gene-George Earle
Gene-George's work encapsulates intuitive responses and spontaneity to given situations, which he may or may not necessarily have authored. A number of works have elements left open for the fulfilment of the work, either incidentally or through co-operation with strangers, giving them an uncertainty or unpredictability he finds enticingly candid.
Julia O'Connell
Julia O'Connell explores language through secreting layers of text onto or under a fabric's surface using hand or machine stitching. Her work explores the stepping-stones of everyday life, giving a platform to seemingly unimportant moments.
Rebecca Gamble
Rebecca Gamble appropriates social activities through her artworks; using conversation as a starting point, she creates actual events, or social gatherings in both physical and virtual spaces
Alastair Levy
Alastair Levy is interested in the quiet subversion of the function of everyday things. The materials that he uses include office stationery, hardware products and domestic items. Through a process of experimenting with and manipulating these kinds of objects he make interventions that put a skew on our experience of the familiar and the mundane.
Ann Walker
Ann Walker explores the ambiguous space in-between and the possibilities of edges and borders using processes such as pinhole photography.
ArtYarn
Art Yarn is a collaborative fibre arts project run by visual artists Rachael Elwell and Sarah Hardacre. Based in Salford, ArtYarn aim to use traditional knitting and crochet techniques in contemporary visual arts projects and recently ‘yarn bombed' sites around Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial. Their work has been featured in national press and knitting publications and will be published in September 2009 in the forthcoming book ‘Yarn Bombing: The Art of Knitting Graffiti'.
Hinge
Hinge, aka exhibition curator, Anne Forgan. will be exploring the making of the exhibition as an exercise in multi-noded communication.
