KELLY LARGE, URIEL ORLOW, ABIGAIL REYNOLDS, DAMIEN ROACH and THE HUT PROJECT.
Curated by Claire Louise Staunton
Hollywood Wonderland takes its name from the 1947 musical short by Jack Scholl. Only screened as a hidden-extra at the cinema, the film is of two singing and dancing tour guides escorting visitors around the Warner Bros studios. Supposedly showing the visitors films in the process of being made, the tourists are being intentionally tricked - the films that they see being produced are merely pieces of archive footage from previously released Technicolor Warner Bros films.
In the movie there is a two-fold ploy in the act of employing the archived footage that extends outside of the camera's frame; firstly, as a prop within the structure of a fictive story to fool the visitors; and secondly, in the fact that real archive footage from previous films from the Warner Bros studios is used. A third revolution comes as the film itself has now become part of the Warner Bros archive. Importantly and implicitly, the film suggests there is an invisible active agent throughout responsible for orchestrating such a set of seamless lies.
The works in this exhibition demonstrate the artists' own maneuvers within established museum collections, archives, libraries and taxonomies. Each of the artists has taken as a starting point catalogued material, organized information or systems and has employed them to meet artistic or imaginative ends. The classifications are composite of the artwork but with altered or destabilized functions. Similar to the film, the third revolution comes when the artworks are then repositioned in a new system of classification through their inclusion by the curator in an art exhibition.
Rather than offering any kind of solution, this exhibition is an exercise in highlighting our dependence on archival and museological devices for access to 'truthful' information and our belief in its validity. It also seeks to forefront the agency involved in the construction and maintenance of such systems through artworks.
The exhibition will include new work from Damien Roach and The Hut Project and newly positioned pieces from Kelly Large, Uriel Orlow, and Abigail Reynolds.
Hollywood Wonderland, curated by Claire Louise Staunton, is the eighth exhibition in the Seventeen lower ground floor exhibition space. The exhibition will run concurrently with David Raymond Conroy: It was part of it before. And now.
The title of the show is in the Webdings font in all printed matter in an attempt to disrupt the classification of the show according to its title, as it is not recognizable alphabetically outside of a computer.
KELLY LARGE
Large's work is concerned with how institutions such as galleries, museums and libraries construct and circulate bodies of knowledge and their affect on culture and its reproduction. Recent projects include: Our Name is Legion for Beacon Art Project, a video work that attempted to produce a spectacle of mass participation within a small, rural Lincolnshire town; Me, Myself and I, an exploration of the function of the artist-in-residence, The New Art Gallery, Walsall; and Announced & Alarmed, two announcement works for This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things at Eastside Projects, Birmingham.
URIEL ORLOW
Orlow's work tackles the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and addresses the spatial conditions of history and memory. Spanning locations in Africa, the Arctic, Eastern Europe and Switzerland, his work can often be seen to employ a method of both horizontal-lateral and vertical-archival investigation in order to explore blind spots in the production and dissemination of knowledge. In 2008 and 2009 Orlow was the recipient of the prestigious Swiss Art Award at Art Basel.
Recent solo exhibitions include Les Complices, Zurich, The Jewish Museum New York, Blancpain Art Contemporain Geneva and Argos Brussels. Recent group exhibitions and screenings include The Whole World at Tate Modern, Artfutures at Bloomberg Space London, New Lands at BFI Southbank London, Around the World in 80 days at ICA London.
ABIGAIL REYNOLDS
Reynolds works with trajectories and ordering systems. She takes found information, (for example a set of dictionary definitions or a police database) and from this she extrapolates a set of processes that result in a form being created. Reynolds brings fugitive knowledge and connections into the immediacy of physical experience. Her work has the puzzle-like quality of something being thought through, offering an invitation to the viewer to consider the journey that has resulted in the creation of the art object on display. Reynolds had a solo show at Seventeen Gallery in January. Group exhibitions include From a Distance at Wallspace New York, Jardin d'acclimation, Villa Arson, Nice, and Embedded at Gimpel Fils in London. She was part of New Contemporaries 2003.
DAMIEN ROACH
Roach's work is like a do-it-yourself kit for rewiring the human brain, where it is not the (ordinary) materials he works with that are transformed, but rather the way we see the world around us. (1) The found object becomes an artefact which functions as the materialised end-product of certain world views, as a symbol of understanding and interpretation of the past and future. (2) A multiplicity of sources funnels into situations best described as 'constellations of possibility', a firmament of incessant creative arbitrage. (3) Each exhibition space is posited as a sensory adventure, where artfulness is intended to trigger new horizons of meaning. (4)
Sentences loosely connected from texts by: Skye Sherwin, 2008 (1), Melanie Bono, 2007 (2), Martin Holman, 2007 (3), Francesco Pedraglio and Caterina Riva, 2008 (4).
Recent solo exhibitions include When the sun goes down at Maison Rouge, Paris, Lemuria at Sies and Hoke, Dusseldorf, Quanta at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland and The deepness of puddles at Gasworks, London.
THE HUT PROJECT
The Hut Project is an artists' collective based in London, one that was formed in 2005 by Chris Bird, Ian Evans, and Alec Steadman. The Hut Project has been observing the art world with an absurdist eye, pursuing a brand of institutional critique that is invested with humour, but which also reveals the underlying pathos of the desire to make art. Edited from Richard Birkett (2008).
Recent solo shows include It's Not You, It's Me at BolteLang Zurich, Old Kunst at ICA London It's Not Me, It's You at Limoncello, London, Temporary Measures at Associates, London.