Past show: Sell YourSelf @ 130 Vicar Lane, Leeds

The group exhibition featuring new work from Jemma Egan, May Hands, Rebecca Molloy, Lindsey Mendick, Sarah Roberts, and Paloma Proudfoot, was the “paradise of visual leisure pleasure” created from a trip into retail’s philosophical, visual heart. They shopped, read Plato, and lay laden with carriers and Chanel scented calling cards. Thinking about the chicken[shop] and the egg and the porosity of the viscous membrane.

The show launched with a private showing on 12th January 2017, then running between 13th – 29th January.

The artists worked collaboratively to construct a site specific moment of sculptural display in the former retail space in Leeds to explore the relationship between sculptural installation and the alluring yet perturbing nature of the world of retail and constructed leisure/pleasure spaces.

The artists involved take inspiration from the ever-changing and illusive atmosphere of shopping centres, window displays, spas and home showrooms. They were enticed by the hollow beauty and exotic eroticism of the transactional process, the material aesthetic, the tactile hyper-real realities of product, sales and succumbing.

An interest in the sensual accessibility of heightened aesthetic environments extended to bad foley, scent, lighting and aspects of visual display. Objects will take the form of protagonists, sculptural commodities, material matter or material possessions, lending themselves to dynamic and stylised modes of display, creating a slippery space for looking.