CUBE Gallery: Manchester Riots And More

CUBEOpen launched in 2007.

Artists, architects and designers are invited to apply with work that reflects current trends and debates surrounding the spaces and places in which we live.

Each year the exhibition highlights contemporary insights into the urban environment. 

The CUBEOpen receives applications from around the globe and visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to see the different ways that artists, architects and designers have been influenced by our surroundings.

A panel of judges are invited annually to shortlist the applications. 

Selectors this year included:Robert Powell - Creative Director, Beam Wakefield; Paul Herrmann - Director, Red Eye Photography Network; Jane Anderson - Creative Director, CUBE; Stephen Whittle - Collections Curator, University of Salford.  

More than 30 artists have been chosen for this years exhibition, pieces include a compactable TATE model (pictured above) mountain range sculptures, flattened buildings and the Manchester Riots in oil. 

This year’s overall winners are 'Shift//Delete, emerging urban interventionists represented by Upper Space' (see the picture below).

To quote the artists themselves: 'The work of this Manchester-based collaboration orbits around central narratives of social, environmental and spatial justice issues and is often unauthorised and anonymously installed within the public realm.'

Er...right.

Confidential often wonders why artists write like that? Do they deliberately not want the public to understand them? Most people simply don't have time to de-construct such ugly sentences and surely the artists want to share their work with an audience? 

Anyway Confidential rang up the gallery to say what the hell do Shift/Delete mean? We got a translation.

Appparently, this is what Shift/Delete meant to say, "We put things up in streets and in parks without permission and then if a person sees the work it may make the person pause for a second and consider other issues about where they are standing." Of course without the complicated jargon it may not be so saleable. 

By the way CUBEOpen commendations went to:  Ian Kirkpatrick and Kristin Posehn