quinta-feira, 21 de janeiro de 2010

'Use & Mention', Jan 26th - Feb 26th, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London

'Use & Mention'
curated by John Chilver

Jan 26th - Feb 26th 2010;
preview Tuesday January 26th, 6-8pm.

Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, Queen Anne Court,
Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9LS.

An exhibition about collage, featuring works by:

Shahin Afrassiabi, Jesse Ash, Diann Bauer, Simon Bedwell,
Vanessa Billy, Juan Bolivar, Adam Burton, Tiago Carneiro da Cunha,
John Chilver, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Stuart Cumberland,
Hans-Christian Dany, Annabel Frearson, Freee,
Babak Ghazi, Ghosts Eat Mirrors, Jeremy Glogan, Luke Gottelier,
Thomas Grünfeld, Gerard Hemsworth, Yuichi Higashionna,
Emma Holmes, Gareth Jones, Kerstin Kartscher, Pil & Galia Kollectiv,
Brighid Lowe, Goshka Macuga, Ellen Makh, Daniel Pettitt,
Gunter Reski, Martha Rosler, Michael Schultze, Heidi Sill, DJ Simpson,
Jack Strange, Michael Stubbs, John Timberlake,
Erika Verzutti, Yonatan Vinitsky, Carla Wright


'Use & Mention'
The appearance of collage in early twentieth-century art marked an immense
alteration in visual experience. In collage, space and time could be
sliced and spliced in ways previously unavailable to photography or
painting; collage could be additive (placement,
juxta-position,com-position) or subtractive (cut, removal).
Although mainstream visual technologies have today normalized methods that
originated in collage, and although the becoming-orthodox of appropriation
and post-production have homogenised the terrain it traverses, collage
nonetheless still empowers tactics that play at de-skilling while invoking
intimacy, interrupted passivity and subtractive force. A reliance on
dramatic juxtaposition was characteristic of classic modernist collage, as
in Hannah Höch’s virtuoso works of the 1920s and 30s. Whatever their
variety, contemporary applications of collage frequently forego
the method of declarative juxtaposition, often favouring instead an
intricate and implosive thinking. Catherine Malabou's writings propose a
concept of plasticity that is intimately linked to explosiveness and
emphatically separated from elasticity: an elastic form can return to its
earlier state after suffering deformations, whereas a plastic form cannot;
instead it retains the signs of alteration when stretched, gouged,
scarred, re-moulded or cut. Collage in this exhibition is understood as a
transferable and mutable apparatus of subtractive plasticity.
'Use & Mention' offers a broad selection of current collage-related
activity. It includes works on paper, text, sound and video works.