On Becoming a Gallery Part Three
On Becoming a Gallery
An Exhibition in Three Parts: Curated by Fieldgate Gallery
Part Three: Jan 15th – Feb 6th
Aisling Hedgecock – Stewart Gough & Tom Ormond
Paul Eachus with videos by Nooshin Farhid
Private View: Friday, 14th January 2011, 6-9pm
Gallery open: Friday - Sunday, 12-6pm
Part accelerated speleothem, part architectonic folly, 'The Ninth Stellation' is a large polychrome sculpture by Aisling Hedgecock made specifically for On Becoming A Gallery. Constructed from an apparently infinite number of polystyrene beads and found Spanish religious ephemera, cut and folded into stellated icosahedrons, Hedgecock employs both meticulous craft and process-led action to transform prosaic materials into pareidolic semblances of biogeological growth.
Stewart Gough & Tom Ormond
Stewart Gough and Tom Ormond continue their collaborative investigation into the sculptural and architectural space around and in between their individual practices. Their two previous collaborations are large scale sculptural works: DeBeauvoir Manor (2006); a Tudor cottage façade made from salvaged loading pallets and plasterboard, which through experience in the round breaks down into a formal abstraction of blue sail like structures. European Vacation (2006-9), is a manipulation beyond the readymade of a ‘Rapido’ folding caravan. Here the existing flat pack panels are re-cut, trimmed and fitted with further hinges, enabling the caravan’s unpacking to continue beyond its designed function, taking flight into abstraction. For ‘Becoming a Gallery’; Gough and Ormond respond to the curators request to provide a wall structure within the exhibition space. They use this opportunity to consider the operation and influence of a partition within the dynamics of an exhibition. Tom Ormond appears courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery
Paul Eachus’s installations and photoworks are presented, perhaps even propositioned by a series of events, something has taken place, is about to take place or is in the process of taking place. Each event then is in process, not static but in a moment of becoming, it is in this sense transitory; it is unstable. It evokes Deleuze’s notion of ‘delire’, the ‘straight furrows’ fixed by society’s processes of categorisation and the channeling of things into their bracketed places are ruptured and the perverse and the irreconcilable are given the space to form new dialogues.
Nooshin Farhid produces video works whilst employing different subjects and scenarios that have a connecting thread, a commonality, namely there is a certain kind of agitation, a restlessness and a deliberate disjuncture that ruptures the familiar trajectory of the traditional narrative. This agitation, and an unwillingness to settle for what is ‘on offer’ (this is the way things are), reflects upon the current state of things socially, politically and ideologically.
On Becoming a Gallery
When a new gallery space opens does it become into the world in the way an artwork does? The Deleuzian notion of becoming is not linear, but a simultaneous realisation of the constituent parts in the becoming of its nature. It is a perception not a process: “We are not in the world; we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming”. With a gallery however, there is a process over time too. This happens on many levels: the introduction of artworks, the trace of its former usage, the accumulative history of exhibitions that the space establishes, the history that each participant and visitor brings. All of these elements then create a context in which the artworks and gallery are experienced and understood, and it is this dialogue that then becomes the gallery’s nature.
When Fieldgate Gallery was asked to curate the inaugural three-exhibition residency at the Angus-Hughes gallery it seemed an interesting prospect to approach it from these different notions of becoming. By definition there will be a linear narrative – all processes take place over time (in this case over the three exhibitions), but the analogy of becoming as a curatorial device remains intriguing. With that in mind the exhibition programme addresses these aspects of realising the gallery over its given chronological time-frame, from its state as an empty space. Through this, each of the exhibitions in different ways, reveal the gallery space as a site of expectations and meanings.
There is no theme, no critical context, no text. It is about filling a space full of stuff over a three-exhibition period and giving it significance. It is about decisions and percepts, it is about “…the organisation of perceptions, affections, and opinions…that take the place of language”, and when words fail, as they will, then all that is left is to do is as Laurence Sterne describes in ‘Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’: “When Corporal Trim flourishes his stick, we are given not the words but a twirling line on the page”.
Richard Ducker, 2010
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