DUMBWAITER

LEE HOLDEN - TOD HANSON - DENISE HAWRYSIO - ALEX SCHADY & MIA TAYLOR

MARGARET O’BRIEN - RICHARD DUCKER

ZOË WALKER & NEIL BROMWICH - BRUNO MARTELLI & RUTH GIBSON (IGLOO)

PRIVATE VIEW: 20th Nov. 6-9pm

Exhibition runs: 21st Nov - 13th Dec, 2009

JAMES TAYLOR GALLERY

Collent Street

Hackney E9 6SQ

As it happens, there is no Dumb Waiter in the building, and one could hardly be imagined, but it remains a useful curatorial metaphor for passing from one environ to another. Each artist is given space to develop a site-specific installation, and in some cases were asked to produce an idiosyncratic response to the space. In Harold Pinter’s play of the same name, which takes place in a basement room, it appears that two hit men, Ben and Gus, are awaiting "orders" regarding their next unknown victim. Simultaneously comic and threatening requests emanate from the unseen operator of the dumbwaiter who appears to be "senior" partner Ben's intended victim at the end of the play. This exercise in semantics and menace corresponds with much of the work in the exhibition.

The word ‘dumb’ in Dumb Waiter implies a stupidity and/or muteness. Yet within this pejorative term of abuse there is a resistance. Muteness has power: it refuses dialogue.

Much of the artwork here exploits this paradox. Language is obfuscated, while sound/noise disguises primal anxieties and architectural interventions demarcate zones. The obscuring of meaning by language is explored in the installations of Margaret O’Brien, Richard Ducker and Lee Holden where they operate at the pre-linguistic, with Kristevian visceral utterances. Bruno Martelli & Ruth Gibson (igloo) creates installations of virtual landscapes that conflate the imagined with the real as they develop ever-overlapping simulacrums through the language of the video game. Tod Hanson and Alex Schady respond architecturally to the space, using direct interventions, getting their hands dirty with the stuff of the real world, often with a charming wit or Baroque exuberance, while Denise Hawrysio uses digital images to create a sequence of voided profiles originating from a 1987 Spotlight directory. In the mix of this is Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich’s inflatable landscape that addresses socio-political borders – both cultural and national.

In a number of Hollywood films, the hero escapes via the dumbwaiter, thus travelling efficiently from one floor [set] to the next. The exhibition’s curatorial oversight is just this intention of moving between one total experience to another within the space of the building. In this way, the viewer could perceive themselves as the dumbwaiter, travelling silently, unseen, between the rooms/zones, developing a dialogue as one passes through to the next. Alternately, as in Pinter’s play, it could be the curator who is the dumbwaiter, delivering increasingly unhinged instructions to the artists. When Gus leaves the room to get a drink of water in the bathroom, the dumbwaiter's speaking tube whistles. Ben listens carefully. We gather from his replies that their victim has arrived and is on his way to the room. Ben shouts for Gus, who is still out of the room. The door that the target is supposed to enter from flies open, Ben rounds on it with his gun, and Gus enters, stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, tie and gun. There is a long silence as the two stare at each other before the curtain comes down.

ZOË WALKER & NEIL BROMWICH

Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich protest and dream, via public art, sculpture and performance working between the gallery space and the public realm.

Their work explores the space between the real landscape and an imagined location. Within this luminal space the duo create objects and situations that invite there audience to join them in enacting transformative experiences they invite us to consider an ‘other’ way of being. There practice brings together a humorous and surreal aesthetic while often engaging with social political issues. Their partnership has resulted in a number of residencies and commissions, including My Island Home for the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sci-Fi Hot Tub, a Kielder Art and Architecture Commission, funded by Wellcome Trust, and have been featured recently on BBC1’s Imagine with Alan Yentob. Recent Live Projects include Love Cannon Parade at Whitechapel Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, and the Big Chill Festival. Walker and Bromwich are represented by Houldsworth Gallery

Web Links:

www.walkerandbromwich.org.uk

www.houldsworth.co.uk

http://www.bbc.co.uk/imagine/tag/zoe_walker.shtml

http://www.balticmill.com/whatsOn/present/ExhibitionDetail.php?exhibID=94

ALEXANDER SCHADY & MIA TAYLOR

Alex Schady is an artist and filmmaker with a broad interdisciplinary practice. His work uses materials immediately to hand, incorporating modern-life ephemera that is manipulated and re-interpreted across a variety of media. Combining craft techniques and digital processes his most recent work uses the language of science fiction to explore the psyche of contemporary culture.

Alongside his own practice he works collaboratively with Hadas Kedar, an Israeli artist. Based 2,000 miles apart they produce work by establishing rules and instructions, only coming together on-site to construct the final installations.

Alex Schady is also co-founder of an artist-run gallery space, Five Years (www.fiveyears.org.uk). Founded in 1998, Five Years enables artists to develop links between the production and curation of visual art, and to explore the processes and discourses of exhibiting. Recent commissions include a video piece for Camden Arts Centre and Animate projects (www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/everything)as well as a public sculpture in Folkestone’s Tontine Street Studios for The Creative Foundation.

MARGARET O'BRIEN

Margaret O’Brien’s practice refers to a psychological in-between space, one that exists between the private and public personas, and the self and others. This is an intangible, insecure space, fragile and changeable in the extreme. It alludes to psychological conditions such as obsessive behavioural patterns, paranoia, a compulsion to control, isolation, alienation, agoraphobia, claustrophobia etc.

O’Brien draws her inspiration from the everyday, the familiar and the domestic environment. In recreating objects or spaces that we encounter on a daily basis, she replaces their normally functional or benign fundamentals with an element of malfunction or mishap.

O’Brien’s practice is multidisciplinary and location is fundamental to her concerns. She uses installation as a material through which the emotive experience of a space is manipulated to create a disorientating psychological environment. The spaces she interferes with become highly sensory experiences. Using devices such as sporadic sound, live malfunction, scale, and the multiple, the psyche of the viewer is affected through an involuntary, sensory response to the work.

LEE HOLDEN

Lee Holden’s work deliberately draws out the normally suppressed connections between areas such as drug abuse, violence, homelessness, poverty and unemployment, and Capitalism’s celebration of glamour, war, and economic success. He examines the operations of advertising, television news, the National Lottery and other stereotypical forms of address so as to lay bare the fundamental contradictions inherent in their production and presentation. His installations employ a wide range of found materials (redundant computers and TVs, advertising literature, industrial furniture, film footage), reinscribing their values and implications so as to render their naturalised meanings problematic and open to dispute. The viewer is subjected to an intense, multilayered audio-visual display, one that parodies the media spectacle, turning its own technologies against itself.

DENISE HAWRYSIO

The Spotlight, 2007

Founded in 1927, The Spotlight is the entertainment industry’s primary casting resource. When I acquired several 1987 editions some years ago, I began by cutting out the faces and rebinding the books; subsequently, video, carbon copy drawings, photographs and site-specific installations have emerged.

This re-casting of these Spotlight directory evokes the spirit of surrealist collage, embracing Andre Breton’s definition of Surrealism as a disruptive “juxtaposition of two more or less disparate realities” however this idea of the disturbing ‘third’ image a few steps further by combining a larger succession of fragmentary images together

TOD HANSON

Tod Hanson is interested in a world over amplified and speeding up, the visual razzmatazz of a globalising culture, the delirium of excessive production and waste, the exponential curve of history, as we hover on the apex of the old civilisations trajectory.

BRUNO MARTELLI & RUTH GIBSON igloo

Based in London, the artists Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli work together and often as igloo. Their practice is multifaceted ranging through installation, intervention, virtualisation, film and performance drawing on the multiple layers of reality and unreality. Much of their work is in recreating environments and systems where coding joins hands with choreographies of the body. Their core concept is the intersection between technology and the human spirit, where our ambivalence to technology is explored with originality, humour and intellect.

Over the past ten years igloo has carried out a wide range of practice-based research in order to develop new & experimental multi-media projects for public presentation. Whilst the artistic rationale for the content of these projects has remained constant, the requirement to research and experiment in order to keep pace with new technological opportunities has led igloo to evolve creative, distinctive and highly disciplined models for collaboration with a wide and distinguished range of professionals supporting research and production of new works.

Research areas include the use of animation tools and digital methods to explore and realise unique approaches in developing real-time screen based works. The creative expansion of interface development into new territories evolving science and new display technologies. Their recent group and solo exhibitions include ISEA, 52nd Venice Biennale, Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York, V22 London, Wharf Road, London. Their recent residencies include RMIT Australia, ArtSway, UK &; Banff, Canada.

Links

www.igloo.org.uk

www.swanquake.com

www.sensoryinstallations.com

RICHARD DUCKER

The use of cement in Richard Ducker’s most recent sculptures emphasises a kind of death, or a modernist monumentality, but the objects it coats and with which it is juxtaposed evoke nostalgia, myths soaked in dreams, and fairy tales gone wrong. If a domestic interior is evoked, it is one in which homely things have sprouted aggressive appendages, grown unexpected textures, or multiplied into viral aggregates, as if to embody the nightmares that commodity fetishes might dream of if they fell asleep. Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, they evoke memories and sensations according to a logic that combines cultural association with phenomenological fantasies of sensual experiences, often clashing within the same piece. In Death Star (and Baby), for example, the familiar shape of plastic bottles is made strange by a coating of intensely black flock, at once attractive and repellent in its soot-like impurity, contrasting the smooth sensation of drinking ‘spring water’, with the gagging artificiality of spray-flock; we are reminded with a jolt how toxic our obsession with purity and cleanliness really is. Lots of fluids seem to run through the work: sucked in by a fur-lined, mouth-like creature with the energy of a crack addict; apparently running between a suitcase – travel, escape and refreshing holidays – and a concrete block that seems to be feeding off (or to?) a tree that might have been killed or perhaps re-energised by artistic usage... Sculptural processes have become the magic instruments of a post-Freudian fairy-tale, in which life and death, pleasure and pain, nourishment and poison have become entangled in an exchange that could lead to deadly battle, intense pleasure, or remain a secret. Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story, affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations – attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling- in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.

-- Patrizia Di Bello, 2007

INSTALLATION IMAGES