PayneShurvell is owned and run by artist and curator James Payne who has shown work at Transition Gallery and is also a writer for Garageland and Arty and a columnist for The Huffington Post and Joanne Shurvell who was previously head of communications for the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
The title of the exhibition, "A Bright and Guilty Place", is taken from Orson Welles’ Lady of Shanghai in which the classic hall of mirrors climax sequence intertwines the virtual and the actual.
"A Bright and Guilty Place" was curated by Dermot O’Brien and James Payne and featured the artists Andrew Curtis, Anka Dabrowska, Dan Hays, LEO, Aidan McNeill, Wrik Mead, Dermot O’Brien, Derek Ogbourne, Frank Selby, Jeni Snell, Ian Whittlesea, Lucy Wood and Mary Yacoob.
Highlights included Daisy Delaney's Liverpool Biennial cars and till receipts as performance, a brand new typeface, a ‘pop-up museum’ in the gallery, the Bible re-written in blue biro, an army helicopter disabled by a video game hacker and the cut-up tapes of William Burroughs.
"In deconstructing the workings of the show itself, ideas of authorship and spectacle are questioned, so that the onlooker’s role takes centre stage in a complex interplay of placement, manipulation and control".
[9] Works in the exhibition included a letterpress transimile of Yves Klein’s business card in an unlimited edition and two redrawn and subtly altered versions of the frontispiece to Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
This 2011 show was curated by the artist Andrew Curtis and featured work by Rupert Ackroyd, Peter Blake, Leon Chew, Nicky Coutts, Greg Day, David Gates, Sarah Hardacre, Gerard Hemsworth, Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Dick Jewell, Peter Kennard, Gerhard Lang, Bruce McLean, Niall Monroe, Jack Newling, Dermot O’Brien, Sian Pile, Rudolf Reiber, Richard Rhys, Daniel James Wilkinson.
The exhibition took as its starting point, an icon of twentieth-century design: the Marlboro flip-top cigarette box, first introduced by Phillip Morris in 1955, which in its current predicament faces a progressively imageless future.
As the decline of the printed visual landscape continues and we become increasingly consumed by a sanitized digital (and in many cases virtual) one, how will the individual define him or herself in this shifting environment?