‘4More’

4More is a landmark public art event taking place on the exterior advertising hoardings of four of Manchester’s trams. Artists contributing to 4More are Helen Chadwick, Ray Richardson, Michael Robertson and Calum Colvin.

It has been said that most that most public art fails because it does not have the wit, meaning or interest of a 45 second lager commercial on television. The artists in 4More have been selected with the aim of redressing this criticism. By locating artworks in the most communicative of all public spaces, 4More will seduce an unsuspecting audience and elicit an unconventional sensation of place and spectacles.

For its status in the city, Helen Chadwick has chosen Manchester United to be the subject of her work. Players feature both as passive icons and as aggressive warriors, while the peripherals, the boots and strips, feature as heroic accoutrements. Ray Richardson’s images feature mythologized working class men in their habitual environments-cars, the seaside, clubs and bars where a moment of calm belies a sense of impending threat.

Painting and photography combine to provide Michael Robertson’s work with a dark, cartoonish humour. A disquieting and absurd encounter between a suited male and a ‘peoploid’ culminates with the man’s literal dehumanisation. The discrepancy between the real and the imagined is the basis of Calum Colvin’s pieces. A derelict landscape is littered with holiday snapshots and fragmented elements of popular culture to set up a provocative and alarming juxtaposition.