dinosaurs in tights: PSL Project Space Leeds

I have been aware of Project Space Leeds for sometime now, however I have not managed to make a visit to its varied and changing collections, Last week after a slow start to the day, I needed abit of a push in the right direction to remind me that there is still hope in todays climate to follow your passions.

The title of the show ‘Hunter Gatherer’ refers to a term used by anthropologists to describe the way in which human beings collected food before the advent of agriculture. Here it references the artists and the processes they have employed to sift through the vast Artemis collection. The resulting works include sculpture, installation, film, prints and drawing which form part static exhibition and part on-going project within the space.

Lubaina Himid and Susan Walsh have made a themed selection of obsolete domestic apparatus from the Artemis collection - washtubs, dollies and washboards - which they have assembled with their own materials into a number of sculptures. Tiny curious onlookers and hungry historians gather to view this memorial landscape which is dedicated to the invisible labour of the women who used them. The artists are both concerned with the power of everyday objects and the making visible of lost live

Amelia Crouch is working in the space, creating a visual manifestation of her thought processes using drawings, diagrams, objects and photographs along with text exploring or creating possible links between them. Taking as her starting point John Wesley’s 1780 edition of ‘Primitive Physic and Receipt’, Crouch is interested in the way medical treatments are grouped together in the book - these resonate with the way in which objects are grouped in the Artemis collection. The anatomical objects selected by the artist become a stand-in for the absent figurative images in the book and aim to open up a different understanding of the body to those perpetuated by the ‘Primitive Physic and Receipt’.

Dinu Li is exhibiting a display cabinet that was originally discovered standing defiantly upright, yet alone inside Chester Market. Upon the end of its tenure, the marketer had stripped his stall bare, leaving behind the cabinet that makes up the front façade.There is a formal quality to the cabinet, constructed as four separate display components, forming a complete hexagonal unit when all four parts are joined up. The emptied out glass display alludes to a range of existential concerns; conjuring up notions of our need to possess and to show off our assets, yet the potential lack of contentment once we have obtained the things we most desire

Nathan Walker’s three channel video projection ‘Objectivity Tropes / Objectivist Poetry / Presto Objectivity’ (12 mins) shows the continual rearrangement of selected objects from Artemis on red, blue and yellow surfaces. Letters appear across the three videos sometimes spelling, but often deconstructing, words and language. The work attempts to understand the poetics of things (words and objects) by employing systems of order with anarchic principles and the curation of meaning. The videos are accompanied by stills from the video which are highly saturated, making visual references to children’s television programmes and images of museum displays from the 1970s.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have created an installation using rubber pigeon decoys and anti-perch spikes. Whilst the decoys are designed to lure pigeons to their death, the spikes are designed to deter birdlife. Within this duplicity and contradiction, the artists highlight the perils to both birds and humans of mistaking simulacra for the real thing, especially in a constructed world populated by representations that make the real world into something more manageable and tolerable.