York St John Past & Present, The ArtSpace, York, until March 24 (From York Press)

York St John Past & Present, The ArtSpace, York, until March 24

3:52pm Friday 12th March 2010 in

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LET’S be frank, says curator Rob Jones, this is not a boats-in-harbours kind of art show.

“And I know there are plenty of art lovers out there who will be relieved to hear this,” he contests, introducing the York St John Past & Present show at The ArtSpace, in Tower Street, York.

Rob believes art should stimulate the brain, not merely the eye, and this philosophy is reflected in the selection of work by a six second and third-year fine art students and four artist alumni from York St John University.

Taking part in the show are Rob and fellow students Stevie-Lee Croft, Alice Rowan, Matt Durrant, Charlotte Barnes and Jenae Dalton, plus graduates Melanie Alexandrou, Nathan Walker, Jade Blood and Julie Bagwash, who is now undertaking her MA studies.

“Art students face some tough times ahead,” warns Rob, who is in his second year at York St John. “Not only is it notoriously difficult to make a go of it as an artist – not many will see Damien Hirst-like rewards – but the credit crunch will hit arts-funding hard.”

Financial considerations aside, he says, the struggle to create something fresh has been a dilemma for artists for decades. “It prompted the Dada anti-art movement of the 1920s, just as it prompted the YBA Sensation show in the 1990s.

“The Past & Present show is not designed to shock, however. This is thoughtful and thought provoking art, work that asks that you stay a while and engage with ideas and not just the aesthetic.

Work that juxtaposes poetry with found objects, made objects, photography, painting, word art and poster art,” asserts Rob.

“If we believe that art is important, and equally, if we accept that for art to remain interesting it has to evolve, then we need new and emerging artists to be able to express themselves however they choose and to be able to experiment freely.”

This is the second year that Greg and Ails McGee have given over The ArtSpace for a York St John show. “Last year was more of a spur-of-the-moment event, but this year Greg, me and Roddy Hunter, the head of fine art, went round the work at college in a fairly arbitrary way to choose what would work in the ArtSpace environment, and not necessarily work together but be a good cross-section of student art and alumni work that we found attractive,” says Rob.

“At the same time we’ve tried to be practical as Greg has offered us this commercial space to work in, and it’s made us think how student work needs to function in the commercial marketplace.”

Such is the unpredictability of an artist’s life that Rob refers to his fellow exhibitors as “the brave few”. “You’re given free range at college, and that’s the whole point, to experiment, but then you can be brought down to earth at the end with the need to think about the big wide world and potential customers, so there’s always that unknown factor about whether it will be successful,” he says.

Among the most eye-catching contributions is Stevie-Lee Croft’s purposely kitsch, DIY work that references B-movie set-building. Her phobia of skyscrapers has led to her creating the show’s 3D cardboard window piece, The City With No People, which lets the viewer tower above her delicate re-creation of these usually monstrous buildings.

Alice Rowan, meanwhile, has given up on trying to disentangle art and life, prompting her to make maps of the inside of her head. Through this erratic process she creates large-scale installations made up of tiny drawings, bits of string and broken circuit boards.

“My method of working, of drawing each picture and sticking it to the wall, reflects my current inability to tidy my thoughts and experiences neatly away into labelled draws or boxes,” she says.

“Instead, I write them down and suspend them in mid-air, where they do not yet have to fit into a definite story.

“The result does not make sense, but it is quite a beautiful mess.”

Some might say, that’s art in a nutshell!

York St John Past & Present runs at The ArtSpace, York, until March 24.