After Castle Market: Salvaging the Urban Obsolete
Wednesday 10th December 2014 - 6pm to 8pm
As part of the Practising Place programme, In Certain Places will present an evening with artist Victoria Lucas, in conversation with cultural geographer Emma Fraser. The event entitled 'After Castle Market: Salvaging the Urban Obsolete', will take place at 99 Mary Street, Sheffield on Wednesday the 10th of December, from 6pm until 8pm and will explore issues of urban renewal, gentrification, memory and value.
Presenting her short film, After (2013), Lucas will discuss her experience of working within what was once a vibrant market hall, as well as her interest in the wider theme of ‘failed utopia’. Additional perspectives will also be provided by Emma Fraser, who will discuss her research into the experience and consumption of urban ruins. Through conversation, Lucas and Fraser will discuss the relationship between urban progress and obsolescence, and examine how creative practices can help to ‘salvage’ the urban obsolete.
The event will also launch Lucas’s new limited edition Castle Market publication, which includes text contributions by Owen Hatherley, Charlotte Morgan and Professor Sarah Wigglesworth, and will be available to purchase for the reduced price of £15 (RRP £22).
About Victoria Lucas
Victoria Lucas is a Sheffield based artist whose practice can be described as a series of considered and poetic interactions with objects and places. Focusing on urban public spaces that frame the everyday, her artworks punctuate the ordinary so that relatively minor happenings are revealed as monumental events. Lucas has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, including a recent solo show at Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia, and group shows at Casa Maauad in Mexico City and Bolsky Gallery in Los Angeles. She co-ordinates Hanover Project, a contemporary art gallery in Preston, where she also lectures in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire. Click here for more information.
About Emma Fraser
Emma Fraser is a cultural geographer, sociologist and PhD candidate at Manchester University whose research interests focus on decay and decline in urban spaces. Her PhD project "Self and Ruin: Imagining the end of the city" considers urban ruins (both real and imagined), in relation to the way we imagine the end of cities and consume versions of the past, with a particular emphasis on video games and digital and 3D representation. Fraser, who has undertaken research in Berlin, Paris, Sydney, Detroit and Chernobyl, has also written about the work of Walter Benjamin in connection to urban renewal, dereliction and memory. Click here for more information.
Practising Place is a programme of public conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different venue in the North of England, and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with people from different backgrounds, who share a common area of interest.
Practising Place forms part of the In Certain Places project, which is run by Elaine Speight and Prof. Charles Quick in the School of Art, Design and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire, and is funded by the Arts Council of England.
Click here to visit the Practising Place blog.
