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Vitrine was invited to contribute to the Leeds City Art Gallery exhibition ‘Something of the Night’ by curator Katy Rochester, and responded with this special commission to Cardiff-based artist Anthony Shapland. ‘Something of the Night’ drew together painting, photography, sculpture and new media art exploring shifting perceptions and experiences of the dark, through work dating from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.
Anthony’s work is characterised by its concern with transitory, liminal spaces, particularly in the shift from day to night, and its focus on the contemporary city at night. For Vitrine, the artist created ‘Nightworkers’, a series of video pieces providing an alternative portrait of those who choose (or who have no choice but to) work the night shift - hotel porters, night-shift engineers, a busker, and a worker in a secure unit for women fleeing domestic violence. They represent the army of (mostly invisible) workers who maintain the city at night, providing essential services and oiling the cogs for those who populate it during the day.
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The artist filmed several of these workers asleep in their own beds during the daytime, and the resulting video loops played on simple monitors in Vitrine’s spaces during the hours of darkness only. For the duration of the exhibition, they could be watched peacefully sleeping in the small hours of the night around the city centre, whilst their real-life alter egos presumably continued with the ‘night job’. The commission from Vitrine allowed the City Art gallery to spill out onto the city streets, to go beyond the gallery spaces themselves, to extend the exhibition beyond normal opening hours, and to reach a totally different audience, those whose business it is to be on the city’s streets during the night. Judging by the grafitti and lipstick marks left on the glass of our Merrion Centre site in the morning, the work certainly reached some new viewers!
A 65-page catalogue, published by Leeds City Art Gallery, accompanied the 'Something of the Night' exhibition and is available from Vitrine, priced £5 plus p+p. It contains the transcript of a conversation between the artist and writer/curator Lisa Le Feuvre. Alternatively, the 'Nightworkers' catalogue is included in the new Vitrine publication, available from October 2006. Please see Publications page to order a copy.
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