 |
|||||||
|
|
LET’S
GET TO WORK CURATED BY GAVIN WADE Kathrin
Böhm LET’S GET TO WORK is a group exhibition of New British Art. The title is taken from a children’s book entitled Machines At Work by Byron Barton. A series of instructions running through the book tell a narrative of knocking down and rebuilding a small city. This provides an underlying ethos for the artists’ work to grow out of, curated in layers to construct a complex series of interconnecting artworks and overlapping installations. Richard Woods will produce a site specific wood block print to cover floor areas within the gallery and a tree branch growing from the gallery wall; all in artificially coloured cartoonesque woodgrain. On top of this will be a series of interconnecting scaffolding structures by Gavin Wade and Keith Wilson. Wade’s support structures provide a base for Polly Staple’s series of photographs, 100 scaffolders, and for Jeremy Deadman’s sound installations using fake wood grain wallpaper and recordings of his own voice to create a moving working building site, manned with monkeys. Wilson will render territorial painted bands through the scaffolding structures creating a shifting dialogue of colour and form. Graham Little’s refined painted sculptures also pursue this spatial camouflage converting simple functional supports into a complex bestiary of fashion and colour. Ian Dawson provides endpoints of fluid construction utilising the destructive processes of burning and melting plastic utilities and Kathrin Böhm will produce site specific painting altering both temporary and permanent architectural features. Cornford & Cross tackle the relationship building game with a new version of their work Cosmopolitan which deals with the controversial act of Russian women selling themselves as wives to western men. The video documentation for this work was originally filmed by a company in California bringing the work full cycle. Interspersed between these structures will also be 2 video works by Harrison + Wood, offering themselves as volunteers or devices to be used in a gruelling sequence of minimal mechanics, and a new work, Mountain, Bike by Simon Starling. After stripping down an aluminium mountain bike to its raw metallic carcass, Starling made a secular pilgrimage to Les Baux de Provence in France, to locate the original source of aluminium's ore, Bauxite. Starling loaded the bike with the raw material which might potentially replicate his means of transport and returned back to base. Starling’s work ethic exemplifies a growing attitude to follow plans through to the bitter end, challenging notions of consumption and our orientation within the built environment. Elizabeth Wright literally offers a new way to imagine the space in which we live and work as she instructs an architects practice to produce a series of drawings which will manipulate and alter the gallery interior, the building facades and the street’s orientation within the city of San Francisco. Build a relationship, build a way of living, build a business, build a house, build a city, build a planet, build the next generation. Let’s get to work. |
 |