YORK creative agency The Beautiful Meme’s new riff of ArtWork events for 2011 in its city-centre offices is expanding its portfolio.

Run in collaboration with Tower Street art gallery According to McGee, ArtWork will be throwing its net wider than usual for new performance artists at Tom Sharp’s design HQ in Barleycorn Yard, Walmgate.

First into the spotlight this evening, April 21, from 6pm to 8pm will be Indivisible duo Victor Strauss and Rebecca Diamond, from Leeds. “It’s a good opener,” says gallery director Greg McGee. “They’re concerned with the relationships between ideas, how one thing demands the existence of the other. There’s no comfort without pain, no light without shade. Or, in their case, ‘He’ depends on ‘Her’ and ‘She’ depends on ‘Him’, but crucially there’s more middle ground than we allow.”

“Victor says ‘life is never black and white, more silver than grey’, and to prove their point, he and Rebecca plan to perform with as much wit, verve and intelligence as you can expect from their increasingly well regarded outfit.”

Last year’s inaugural ArtWork series was a celebration of York St John’s fine art students, giving them an opportunity to flex their ideas in the real world, away from the academic context.

Reflecting on how the series progressed, Greg says: “It soon became clear that rather than use the office space as a panacea for an art gallery, the nights really began to fizz and sharpen when the performance element took centre stage. That’s how both Tom and my respective visions for ArtWork were harnessed.

“We thought, ‘let’s do something that is a privilege to helm, not just for us as curators and artists but also for the invitees to attend.”

Roll on to 2011 and Tom and Greg’s mission is to “wield the kind of work that burns itself into the memory banks of all who have witnessed it”. “If the guests can experience something that they’ve never experienced before, something that makes them go ‘wow!’ and continues to hold their imagination well into the weekend, then that’s a case of mission accomplished,” says Greg.

Tom noted how last year’s events took on a life of their own. “We always had high standards – The Beautiful Meme is, after all, a creative design agency, so to impose challenging priorities on the projects came very naturally to me,” says the agency director.

“People often think that calibrating an art exhibition is about being a cheerleader while the artist indulges his or her creative buzz, but we ensure that the buzz is underpinned with rigour.

“And so we find ourselves in a position where the anticipation and the expectations are so high that it makes sense to go further afield, to showcase artists who keenly prioritise the smallest details as much as the bombast of the actual event. Showmanship and ‘shamanship’ are great, but if there’s a forgotten Yellow Pages or that afternoon’s biscuit tray in the frame then the magic is lost.”

Greg takes up his point. “That’s very much what we expect to harness at these happenings: the mystique and magic of watching a performance that is as discombobulating as it is transcendental,” he says. “We have the requisite calibre of artists in our corner, and we can’t wait to unleash them.”

Victor Strauss and Rebecca Diamond’s opening event will be followed by shows run with a similar vibe. “There’s the initial concept, provocative and interrogative, and then there’s the carefully calibrated performance, all done with that requisite lightness,” says Tom.

“Believe me, we’re only too aware of the potential pitfalls of performance art. All earnestness, bodily fluids and art about art are out of the window. Our second artist, Cumbrian-born Matthew Harper, for example, has a cracking night planned for Friday, May 20.”

Matthew has cerebral palsy, and in a show designed to be both entertaining and unsettling he will place photos of himself alongside icons of beauty such as Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album cover, taking scissors and marker pens to his image to disguise his disability. “Matt is a witty, irreverent guy. Earnest this is not,” says Tom.

Charlotte Barnes will be making a show of herself on June 17, and the series concludes with Scarborough artist Christopher Mollon on July 22, when he takes an idea – in this case, how lifestyles differ in the urban and the rural – and uses time, his own limits of endurance and three cairns surrounded by ground salt to explore it. Each event runs from 6pm to 8pm for one night only.

“These showcases are about as far from po-faced, navel-gazing self-indulgence as art can get. It’s spiky and stylish stuff,” says Tom.

“With such multidimensional gusto, the 2011 Artwork series promises to build on the luminous core established last year, and bring the very best of performance art to the centre of York.”