Entering the decompression chamber and a new era
Beneath the surface of the locked down world the oxygen is running low. The tiny life support capsules sustaining our presence in the airless vacuum of millions of hard-drives, can only sustain three dimensional life for so long. It is time to head for the surface, but not too rapidly.
This year, the BasementArtsProject programme for the New Year will be starting its run roughly in tandem with the Spring Equinox, our first exhibition coming on Thursday 7th April. Since first talking about the exhibition formerly known as ‘Compressed Time Frames’ with ArtCouple a.k.a Simon Bradley and Ursula Troche, the timeline for all of our 2020 exhibitions has contracted and expanded so rapidly as to give one the bends. Finally, as we are able to throw off the shackles of the numerous interminable lockdowns of the last couple of years, the hyperbaric chamber of the Leeds Art Scene prepares itself to give art back its’ oxygen with ‘Decompressed Time Frames’.
Come and join us for the start of our 2022 programme
PREVIEW / Performance
Thursday 7th April | 5.30pm – 8.30pm
Exhibition Open
Sunday 10th April | 2pm – 4pm By Appointment
Monday 11th April | 11:30am – 2:30pm
Thursday 14th April | 11:30am – 2:30pm
Sunday 24th April | 2pm – 4pm By Appointment
Monday 25th April | 11:30am – 2:30pm
Closing Night / Performance
Thursday 28th April | 5.30pm – 8.30pm
‘Working From Home’ is a new concept for many people out there in post-pandemic land. It is now becoming commonplace to see schedules bearing the legend ‘WFH’. Here at BasementArtsProject I have been doing this for years. Okay, I don’t get paid for it as it is not part of my official paid work, but working from home is a blurred boundary concept that I am more than familiar with.
BasementArtsProject is my home. It is also an underground gallery space; underground as in spirit, but also as in physically subterranean; located as it is in the basement of the family house. During our exhibitions I remain at home on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays in order to keep our ever changing exhibitions open to the public, but between shows is the time that I like to get out and do the part of my job that requires visiting our exhibitors and planning projects with them.
For the last ten months or so I have been static at BasementArtsProject, partly due to C***d restrictions, but in part also due to working with artist Keith Ackerman on the ongoing public sculpture ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. Begun as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019, we never expected to finish such a monumental undertaking within the one hundred days of the YSI, but we did not envision a three year process. Thnx C***d.
Now, three years down the line, the project is in its final stages with the only remaining job to get it set upright, in place on its foundation. Since bringing the sculpture to the site that will be its eventual home ad infinitum, the response from the public has been fascinating. The nervousness of approaching a project in which the whole process of making is being done under the watchful gaze of the public, ebbed away as the days have become weeks, that have become months and that now register almost a year. How would people respond to us working at the edge of the road in the middle of South Leeds? The artist responsible for the creation of Jacob’s Ladder - Keith Ackerman has had nothing but a waves of positivity in an ocean of comments.
Opening night for ArtCouple: Decompressed Time Frames
We hope we will see you over the course of the year, pop in during exhibition times and have tea or coffee with us - always free.
Decompressed Time Frames