About

Bob Levene is an artist based in Sheffield & London. She recently completed a body of work in which she adopted pseudo-scientific strategies and anthropological methods of recording to analyse the 'nature' of things, exploring the scientific and artistic approaches to making sense of the world. Her work manifests as recorded video and sound, performance, installations, films and photography.

She is currently pondering (rather slowly) on Land Use, Infrastructure, Capitalism and Trees.

The Work

In a recent body of work that includes pieces like Depth of Field  Bob was interested in how an individuals understanding of the physical world is shaped by the limitations of the body they inhabit. She often uses the land to experiment with our perceptions of distance, speed & time like in the Past Signal series. In Inertial Frame she explores how the use of communication & recording technologies and transportation change our understanding of those perceptions. She is drawn to the oddities and contradictions that arise when we try to mediate, order and measure the world using tools, instruments & guides, like in As Far As The Eye Can See. Works   like Tell me when you think one minute is up from...  and Tim  e Frame take further ideas around time, temporality and the individual.

In earlier works, such as Experiments for Microphones, the focus was more on recording technologies. Handmade was born out of a curiosity around the cultural and social use of sound reproduction. This investigation also looked at how sounds relate to the action or object that is making it, with Park, The Space Between and Jump Cuts she draws from film and the cinematic playing with notions of 'the live', presence, and the soundtrack.

Throughout all her work there us often underlying humour and simplicity about it and there is an emphasis put on play and experimentation. It touches on the relationships between the scientific and artistic approaches to making sense of the world. Ultimately questioning ideas around representation and the notion of ‘truth’.

Biography

Bob Levene was born in Kingston Upon Thames, Greater London in 1975. She studied Fine Art at Hull School of Art and Design and a few years later with a AHRB grant completed a MSc Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone, University of Dundee.  She currently lives and works in Sheffield and has a studio at Yorkshire Art Space, where she also runs her commercial projects as an art documentation photographer In Two Dimensions.

In 2003 Bob spent 5 months in Colima, Mexico thanks to an Arts Council Fellowship, on her return she showed the work at the Globe Gallery, South Shields. That year also saw her selected by Kathy Battista for FA Projects FX show. In 2006 she was awarded an Artsadmin mid-career Bursary and her first major commission from Sonic Arts Network and solo show at Cornerhouse (Manchester).

During 2004 and 2007 Bob co-founded and ran Hull Art Lab an interdisciplinary arts organisation in a warehouse space in Hull working with a diverse group of artists such as Anthony McCall, Anne Bean Shu Yang, Wang Chu, Phillip Jeck and Melt Banana, plus many more. At the same time was collaborating on a community based oral history project called Resound which explored how the regeneration effected the people of Hull's memories about their city. Since 2000 Bob has collaborated with Rob Gawthrop under the name Automated Noise Ensemble, making installations, performances, CDs and vinyl, exhibiting and performing at Dundee Contemporary Arts, International 3, Modern Art Oxford and Maribor, Slovenia.

In 2008 Bob was selected for Future 50 / AXIS at PSL (Leeds) curated by Ceri Hand & Liz Aston and was artist in residence at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Wakefield) as a part of the Space for 10 project. This marked the start of a series of travels and residencies spawning a body of work which has since been screened and exhibited in AV Festival / Northern Gallery Contemporary Art (Sunderland), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), MK Gallery (Milton Keynes) and Ultima, Contemporary Music Festival (Oslo) and resulting in nomination for the 2009 Northern Art Prize and Best film in the Art and Experimental Film Category in Film & Video Festival(Switzerland). Most recently Bob exhibited a new commissioned work called Time Frame at National Media Museum, which she made in collaboration with Anne-Marie Culhane.

Bob has delivered public lectures at a number of academic and art institutions including Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Wakefield) Brighton University, University of Northumbria, Leeds Metropoliton University, OPA Gallery (Guadalajara, Mexico) and Theatre Academy (Helsinki). She was interviewed alongside Alvin Lucier on BBC Radio 3, Hear & Now and took part in Curious Sound alongside David Toop and Haley Newman at Cornerhouse (Manchester). Bob is currently an associate lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

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