Exhibitions
curated by_vienna 2014, The Century of the Bed 2014
curated by Egija Inzule with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Morag Keil, Mélanie Matranga, Bonny Poon, Josephine Pryde, Sarah Staton 2.10.2014–13.11.2014
Excerpts from How They Met. Part 1: Mother and Her House, SupaStore, The Issues of Our Time (1&3), Fille/Garçon, In the Middle of Affairs is a group exhibition based on “remakes” of preexisting exhibitions with works by artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Morag Keil, Mélanie Matranga, Bonny Poon, Josephine Pryde and Sarah Staton. Curator Egija Inzule selected and brought them together as her contribution to Vienna’s annual curated_by festival.
The original exhibitions came from different languages, spaces, contexts and times. Within this “thinking through exhibitions,” the miniature shows are listed one after the other (along with corresponding material, such as original press releases and ephemera), in the four separate gallery rooms of the Gallerie Emanuel Layr. To insist on quoting the context of a work’s “original” exhibition can be seen as an exaggeration thought to underline the specific social relations, situations and conditions that frame the artworks and modes of working and which define the reasons for the artworks’ and working approaches specific forms.
How They Met. Part 1: Mother and Her House and Part 2: Sex was a collaborative project by the artists Josephine Pryde and Sarah Staton, presented in form of two exhibitions simultaneously on view at Galerie Bleich-Rossi and the Gabriele Senn Galerie in Vienna in 2008. The artists’ central themes of their exhibition—how they got together, how they started to know each other, and where they came from—were meant to refer to the social relations running through art practices. In their press text in 2008, when referring to the “results” of their collaboration and re-viewing it they wrote: “Now, thankfully at last fully socialised, they review the tropes. How feeble were they? Why attempt to establish a working partnership? Even as a fake? Now? Where can you drive the autobiographical? Where will it drive you? What does the labour that is self-knowledge look like anyway.”
The Issues of Our Time (1&3) was part of a series of three exhibitions put together by the team of the exhibition space castillo/corrales. Parts 1 and 2 took place in the exhibition space in Paris in 2013, while part 3 was conceived for the event-based program of Artists Space Books & Talks in New York City in 2014. Part 3 included a carpet with cables running underneath it, designed by artist Mélanie Matranga, among other elements and artworks specifically conceived as stage and backdrop for the two-week public program. The Issues of Our Time series began with discussions about approaches to the thinking and making of art that were described as the dynamics of self-portraiture through projection. The exhibition generated a kind of fluent whole, based on separate works by different authors.
Within the space of The Issues of Our Time (1&3) another exhibition (also co-curated by Egija Inzule) In the Middle of Affairs (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart: 2010) was mentioned, more as a footnote. Within the context of this exhibition the artist Bonny Poon performed her Re-Enactment of The Cool-Down, Body Movement Workshop (help for breathing and bending). The performance and the installation consisted of water bottles by an internationally-known Austrian brand and white exercise towels, as a trace in the space, a brand of the artist herself, a tag of an artwork almost invisible, but simultaneously inscribed in many attitudes and gestures of the gallery and the exhibtion’s everyday lifestyle.
The exhibition Fille/Garçon was a solo gallery show by the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster realized in 1995 at Gallery Koyanagi in Tokyo. The installation was an homage to the sentō, the Japanese public bath. Gonzalez-Foerster captured its emblematic formats: including a gender based colour-split of the space—baby blue and pink. Previously gender-mixed, separate bathing was introduced in Japan during 1868–1912, a time of modernization and westernization. Further elements in Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation adopted from the sentō were little wooden chairs and buckets, low mirrors (here represented as baby blue and pink tinted acrylic glass plates: story-boards with cut-out magazine collages). The middle of the space is filled with a large tiled area in the same colour-split code, a baby blue and pink reference to Carl Andre’s work Steel-copper plain (1969), here as a signifier for the sentō hot tub. A text by Benjamin Weil that accompanied the two parts of the exhibition—“The first part goes with the pink side, the second with the blue”—describes the many notions, including the cinematic perspective of this work, discussing “intimacy within the public place where one is exposed and simultaneously protected by convention. It occurs in a particular type of time frame: the body takes over the mind”.
Sarah Staton’s SupaStore was an art-translation-of-fashion pop-up store, a seven-year project that the artist ran from 1993–2000. Light gestures and works by artists, made specifically for the “store” context, were installed to resemble and mimic what fashion does and how fashion and shopping circulates. SupaStore was a pre-internet hub, materialized in a collection of smaller objects, or things with a definable “use”. The project was backed up by the strongly-developing notion of shopping: “Shopping is melting into everything and everything is melting into shopping.” (The Harvard Guide to Shopping: 2001) The re-enactment in Vienna of Sarah Staton’s SupaStore, entitled SupaStore/Sleep 2014, includes excerpts from SupaStore Boutique (1994), SupaStore NYC (1997) and SupaStore Manc (1998). Books, music and video references have been included in the installation to suggest a meta-level notion, a kind of theatrical gesture to provide evidence to the whole idea and the large acceptance of network-lifestyle, consumerism and “shopping” in general.
A Clump of Plinths 2009
A commission to create a large scale exhibition for the Lowry’s Promenade Gallery. A Clump of Plinths takes its name from the 1963 Cambridge Footlights review A Clump of Plinths/Cambridge Circus. The absurdist methodology carries through into the galleries where a series of sculptures activate the three long triangular bays that comprise the Post Modern exhibition space. This exhibition can be seen as a theatrical review comprised of three acts. Profit driven commercial architecture as urban framework for polarized social relations is the overriding theme. Concrete, steel reinforcement rods, clinker blocks, plaster board, stud frames, glass, metal and mirror veneers are employed to play with surface and to solicit touch. A vast glass curtain wall 30m in length and 8m in height frames the view from the gallery across the Quays. The View: A massive construction site—BBC’s regional outpost operating within the exhibition as an element of ever changing live art—a living element as counterpoint the sculptural assemblages.
XYZ 2011
Site Gallery Commission, Augmented Reality. Sarah Staton & Chris Hodson together to develop a hybrid art form that works across the real and the virtual. But what does this mean? Matter with rendered matter. XYZ problematizes sculpture; gravity, weight, resolution, and authorship are called into question. Collaboration, co-creation, contingency and becoming, become the thing. Objects that exist physically such as concrete, wood, stone, metal and glass are completed and become artworks through augmentation made visible on the small screen of a mobile device. Utilising Junaio platform and beta testing the work at Site Gallery the artists generate a project that takes art into screen space and back out again. This is both a mass project and a highly personalized one. An exploration of the tense line between classical art production and the radical opportunism that digital cultures are creating.
Northern Rainbows 2011
I was quite astonished
She gripped me like a hawk
Her talons were quite famished
Ascend harpy
Sing harpy
Descend harpy
Give me harpy.
for a lifetime of inspiration to Mark E Smith & all all all of The Fall—thank you
How They Met
Part 1: Mother & Her House
Part 2: SEX
A duo exhibition by Josephine Pryde and Sarah Staton held simultaneously at Galerie Bleich-Rossi and Gabriele Senn Galerie, Vienna, Austria. With exhibition poetry by Ellen Cantor.
How They Met, Part 1: Mother and Her House Part 2 Sex: was evolved over a year with Josephine Pryde and Sarah Staton coming together periodically to discuss and to attempt to make some things together. The artists also purchased a circa 1986 telephone which reminded them of their post college years and the idea that to be a professional artist one would certainly need a cool landline device. This phone appears on the invitation card.
When thinking about what form the duo exhibitions might take, an idea that the artists played with were stain paintings, a remaking of Helen Frankenthaler. In the end the exhibition resolved without collaboratively created works. A duo showing of photography by Josephine in both galleries was accompanied by sculpture by Sarah at Bleich Rossi and doodle paintings by Sarah at Gabriela Senn and throughout, some poetry by Ellen Cantor.
Sticks Stacks Shucks Sucks 2008
Bothy Gallery Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Programmed to coincide with the Noguchi Exhibition, Sticks Stacks Shucks Sucks is the B–side to Nogucchi’s A–side. The Bothy Gallery has fat sculptural walls and sits like a jewel box with long views across the immense Yorkshire landscape. Intense colour defines the interior spaces as a free fall Neopolitan explosion and background for Stacked Sculpture’s including Plectrum Plinth for English Craft Object, St Ives circa 1965, 2004: Fat Stack 2008, Square Stack 2008, Premium Stack 2008 and Library Shelf 2004. At the entrance a Threaded Table sculpture and pairs of paintings that define stacks from perspective of plan and elevation. Disguised but very present, indeed essential, each room has a hidden artwork in the form of bespoke radiator cover.
In Situ Ex Situ 2007
Solo Exhibition, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
On the trail of the lonesome pine—
In the pale moonshine our hearts entwine,
Where she carved her name and I carved mine;
Oh, June, like the mountains I’m blue—
Like the pine I am lonesome for you,
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
On the trail of the lonesome pine
Green, or How We Missed Modernism 2003
Solo Exhibition, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute.
Green, or How we Missed Modernism is titled as a provocation. Aesthetic Modernism pulls Europe out of the 19th century and delivers it into the 20th century. How will we still be Modern in the 21st century? Green, or How we Missed Modernism offers layered readings. Melding personal history with thoughts on national identity, Green, or How we Missed Modernism predicts the growth of far right political positions—fallout from neo liberal economics. Within The Gallery: An island of flags, a Union Flag constructed from broken bottles and first made for the exhibition Broken English Serpentine Gallery 1991; a St Georges Flag; a Felt Tongue with Euro Stars; Fat Cigar; Beauracratic Trousers and Missing Fingers Fist; all relics from the exhibition Historical Political/Blood Lust Money Lust, Tannery Gallery 1994. A large silkscreen wool hanging In Chunder Field 1997, exhibited first in a small commercial gallery not short lived on Warren Street. Also in the room, Glass Bricks 2003; On the walls, selected paintings/anti-paintings—English Works in Pretty Colours 1999; Lodnon 2000; Leafs 2003. Viral Buds 1994, from the 1993 exhibition Ha-Ha; a Mouse Man Table family furniture from 1948; Paper Pulp Butts and Coins 1991. New works for the exhibition include a cast bronze fast food tower Persistence of Gothic, Hi Low Snax with Apple Core 2003, Hard Edged Abstractions 2003, a wall painting taken from broad sheet daily stocks and shares charts. Glass Bricks 2003, a free standing generic glass brick wall sculpture—homage to Maison Vert and social comment glass bricks as 1990’s signifier for instant workspace/domestic chic.
Flower Power 2002
Two works in solo exhibition at kjuhb Kunstverien, Koln Bean Tree, 2002, wood paper, glass and bronze H 1m × W 30cm × D 30cm and Millionari, 2002, acrylic on canvas H 80cm × W 1.6m. We know the name of the man who sells the coffee but we forget the name of the man who grows the coffee.
AntiPaintings
How the West has Won and Lost, The Masses are Massive, 3 wishes HARDCORE, Greeeeeedi, Abstract Gestures, Harvest, Its Folks…, Black Rain, Motifs with Condom, Motifs with Pill Packet, Smiley, Looking Good Charisma, Night of the Hunter, Club Bohemia, Selvedge, 24/7 Business, Hotel, In God’s Own Good Thing Country, Swan, Lodnon, Black Milk. A body of work to mark the passing of the American Century. The method is silkscreened bleach on denim. Biography: Exhibited as large wall based elements within exhibitions that include JTP Hales Gallery 1994, AntiPaintings, The Store and More 1999; Malerei, INIT Kunsthalle, Berlin 1999; EAST International 1999; Traktor by Merlin Carpenter, Gregorio Magnani, 2000; Telescopic Memories and the International Trash Set, Orbit House, London 2000; How the West has Won and Lost, Windows Gallery Prague, 2000: How the West has Won and Lost, Czech Centre, London, 2001; The Good the Bad and the Ugly MOCAD, Denver, Colorado, USA; Meeuw & Krijs, Lokaal 01 Breda, NL, 2001; Malerei II Ausstellung Nulldrei, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, 2003; Green, or How we Missed Modernism, Milton Keynes Gallery 2003; Pick Your Poison, Martin van Zomeren/gmvz, 2006; Paulo Post Futurum, Breda Museum, 2007; A Clump of Plinths, The Lowry, 2009; Dear Lynda, White Columns, NYC & Chelsea Space, London 2012, Eastside Projects, UK & Dundee University, Scotland 2013. An unfinished body of work mostly made between 1994 and 2000 at various studios and workshops including Minet Road & Print Works Trust, Brixton, London and The Store and More, Waterloo, London.