Artists Statement

A portal was created in the 404th Wall between 30th October and 8th November 2014 when Alexia Mellor and Anthony Schrag crossed the threshold to explore what lies on the other side. During this period they used Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Six Memos for the Next Millennium as guidebooks for their explorations. Each day, they navigated this new land with one of Calvino’s memos: lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude, visibility and constancy. Their findings were sent back to the team of Extra Dimensional Explorers (EDE) and invited guests at the NewBridge Project Space in Newcastle who interpreted and responded to a variety of artefacts. Mellor and Schrag connected with the EDE team using livestreams, which have been archived in a top secret vault. As a new recruit to the EDE team, you can access these videos as you prepare for your own mission of crossing the 404th divide. Search the archive below. Don’t worry. There is no need for a chewing-gum stretching machine afterwards.

Day 4

• Alexia Mellor works across disciplines, using humour and performative strategies to investigate issues of place, security, and identity in an increasingly corporatized and mediated landscape.  alexiamellor.com
• Dominic Smith engages and plays with codified hierarchies and systems. The outcomes are often experimental social engagements with emergent trends and behaviours.  dominicsmith.info
• Anthony Schrag‘s work is research-led, and he sees the processes of collaborative engagement as the core value of the work, rather than the production of art objects.  anthonyschrag.com