Posts tagged: 2021

Artist: SHARP

Title: Dancing with Elvis

Year: 1999 – 2021

Medium: Photographic print

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Accession Number:

Acquisition info: Gifted by the artist in 2021.  SHARP studied at the University of Salford the late 1990s.

Dancing with Elvis are a set of 4 photographs that were taken within a space of Queer reflection afforded by the home studio environment of SHARP’s Manchester council tower block flat. These resulting works sit somewhere between self-portraits and still lives and present SHARP’s queer gaze upon themselves via
the television screen. Mirrored via Elvis is a masculinity, a butchness and a queerness which is overt and desired and is situated within SHARP’s everyday life.

The period of the 1990’s was the decade in which people lived under Section 28 which criminalised the ‘promotion of homosexuality’. This was a period of censorship in terms of visibility and representation of Queer identity. SHARP’s butch dyke and non-binary identity is not something that was available via mainstream media or even within their art education and so they created out of necessity as a personal exploration. This set of 4 photographs are split into 2 pairs. The first pair which show Elvis on an
old TV set within a darker deep red surround are the original prints from their Salford University degree show in 1996. The second pair were reprinted in 2021 and show Elvis in a cowboy hat surrounded by a softer pinker light which floods the still drawn makeshift curtains. Dancing with Elvis are a part of a larger Queer archive of photographic works by SHARP spanning 4 decades.

Artist: Laura Daly, with music composed by Lucy Pankhurst

Title: The Storm Cone

Year: 2021

Medium: Augmented Reality App

Dimensions: N/A

Accession Number:

The Storm Cone by Laura Daly is an immersive artwork that considers our intrinsic relationship with the past. At its centre is a journey through music and sound that charts the fading away of a brass band during the interwar years (1918 – 1939). Using new technologies to trace lost bandstands in their final days of mass popularity, we first encounter the band performing as a full ensemble, in 360˚audio. Breath-taking detail can be heard from every instrument as you move amongst the absent musicians; proximity altering the perception of sounds as Pankhurst’s score builds and then returns to a single note. From the powerful, collective sound of the band, the journey then follows the departed musicians into eight spatial sound works by Daly, where their fragile solo phrases merge and mutate in new environments. History, fiction, artifice and reality combine within this sensory encounter to confront the present with its past.

Acquisition info: The Storm Cone is commissioned through a partnership between University of Salford Art Collection and Metal in collaboration with Salford Culture and Place Partnership on the occasion of Rediscovering Salford. Generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Also supported by PN Daly Ltd and Zinc and Copper Roofing.