Stanley Picker Gallery

Stanley Picker Gallery presents the outcome of Cally Spooner’s Fellowship: OFFSHORE will be part inaugurated, part archived as a structure, in disguise as a performance, in disguise as a company.

Glossary 

OFFSHORE: 
A structure that enables EVERYONE (some of whom will have met before, some of whom will not have met) to maintain a state of rehearsal, over a number of days, in public.

Read full OFFSHORE Glossary

About OFFSHORE

“Arriving from literature, theatre and a messy, unrequited love affair with Philosophy, OFFSHORE scripts fictional structures to let real life (non-fiction) in,” says Spooner. “It sits somewhere between a philosophy school for embodied knowledge, an engine, an alibi, a backroom, a rehearsal and some deliberate, unguaranteed, social plumbing.”

Over the past eighteen months, Spooner organised five trans-disciplinary gatherings with near fifty performers, writers, artists and thinkers – including from Kingston’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) – that laid the groundwork of OFFSHORE. The gatherings researched the labour of maintenance, transactions in Human Resources and use of living tools as well as the dynamics and discontents of the social body in relation to the performative standardisation and quantification of language or life. Coincidentally, OFFSHORE formed as a group of core cast to draft new vocabulary and terms of how to perform. Departing from the ‘business ontology’ of a present-day financial, corporate or neoliberal mindset, OFFSHORE operates through theoretical and fictional modes that are always just a few steps removed from reality.

Coinciding with its launch at Stanley Picker Gallery, OFFSHORE IN KINGSTON takes residency at Walmer Yard – a new building designed and crafted by Peter Salter in collaboration with Fenella Collingridge and programmed by the Baylight Foundation. Walmer Yard proposes to map a more empirical understanding of architecture, using tools from the fields of neuroscience, psychology and anthropology. A text by Lynton Talbot will be published in Walmer Yard’s annual yearbook, as an outcome of OFFSHORE’s residency, documenting how the experience of living at Walmer Yard may inform the practical and theoretical investigations of working together.

OFFSHORE IN KINGSTON also includes the work ‘Improvisations out of Recitativo/Clouds and Noise – Fragments after Lucretius and Negri’ – by David Ryan (score) William Crosby (Guitar) Joe Zeitlin (Cello).

OFFSHORE IN KINGSTON is:

Chloé Turpin

Joe Zeitlin

William Crosby

Roland Brauchli

Michelangelo Miccolis

Maggie Segale

Lynton Talbot

Juli Brandano

Jesper List Thomsen

Emily McDaniel

Cally Spooner

Alice MacKenzie

Rebecca Thorn

Howard Caygill

David Ryan

Cally Spooner is an artist and writer. Her most recent solo shows include Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2018), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017), The New Museum, New York, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (both 2016). Her recent group shows include Serpentine Gallery and Kunsthaus Zurich (both 2017). Her book of Scripts is published by Slimvolume (2016), and her novel Collapsing In Parts is published by Mousse (2012). Upocoming solo shows include the Swiss Institute, New York, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (both 2018) and the Art Institute Chicago (2019).

As a culmination of his Stanley Picker Fellowship, internationally renowned product designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki presents a new solo exhibition that explores a definition of sound design in our contemporary period. The title Furniture Music comes from French composer Eric Satie’s description of his own music as ‘a sound that should not be actively listened to, but present at the periphery of our daily lives’. Suzuki’s work seeks to examine exactly those sounds at the periphery, which can greatly impact our environments, and offer solutions to real-world problems by challenging how these sounds are designed.

Suzuki’s decade of experience in sound design has spurred his work in creating soundscapes through the use of software, as well as in art installations and product design. Despite recent advances, he finds that sound design at the manufacturing level is falling behind other areas of design and technology, partly due to the field’s lack of definition. The everyday sounds of our contemporary industrialised society – such as those from computers, mobiles, appliances, transport, construction, and more – generate dramatic levels of noise pollution affecting psychological processes of the brain – such as one’s mood – in ways we are often unaware of. Developed out of Suzuki’s investigation on how sound affects us, Furniture Music attempts to re-design the domestic soundscape and propose ways for sound to not turn into noise but rather help enhance harmony and comfort within one’s surrounding environment.

‘When you do your laundry, why must you listen to a dreadful pounding noise that may distract you from your tasks or simply take you away from the present?’, states Suzuki. ‘Could a washing machine make a beautiful ambient sound instead? Our lives may be made easier with technology taking care of most of our chores, but perhaps, with a little imagination, we could redefine how sound impacts on our mental wellbeing’. Furniture Music comprises two main bodies of work: an immersive installation, titled Sound of the Waves (2018); and a series of appliances and furniture pieces conceived for the kitchen/living areas of the home which include, amongst others, a Singing Washing Machine (2018), developed in conversation with composer Matthew Herbert, and a Musical Kettle (2017).

The positive influence of the sea (and generally of nature) on our well-being is an established fact and is partly explained through the the mental association of nature with downtime, while the urban environment is commonly the backdrop for work and anxiety. In Sound of the Waves (2018), Suzuki explores the use of minimal and abstract sonic representation of nature to evoke relaxing and meditative emotional responses. The work is made of twelve rotating cylinders filled with little pebbles that are choreographed through real-time tidal data from twelve beaches around the world. As the cylinders rotate, they recreate the sound of waves and acoustically generate an artificial representation of the ocean. In Suzuki’s words, ‘It’s like a musical instrument played by the sea’.

Furniture Music events programme is curated with Disegno and realised with kind support from The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

In-kind support to Yuri Suzuki’s exhibition is kindly provided by SCP

Yuri Suzuki’s Stanley Picker Fellowship Edition Acid Brexit – a 7″ Limited Edition Blue Vinyl is now available to listen to and watch online, and purchase on vinyl from 1 March 2019.

Yuri Suzuki (b. 1980, Tokyo) is a sound artist, designer, and electronic musician who explores the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces. He looks into the relationship between sound and people, and how music and sound affect their minds. His work in sound, art, and installations has been exhibited all over the world. After studying Industrial Design at Nihon University, Suzuki worked for the Japanese art unit Maywa Denki (who created the Otamatone). He then moved to London to study Design Products at the Royal College of Art under the tutelage of Ron Arad. During this period, he also worked with YAMAHA to produce musical experiences. In 2013, he started teaching at the Royal College of Art, while being a research consultant for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop, and Teenage Engineering. In this same year, he set up Yuri Suzuki Design Studio, focusing on R&D, and sound and design consultancy work, where he collaborates with many clients including Google, Moog, will.i.am, Panasonic, and Disney to name a few. Suzuki created the DIY musical instrument OTOTO (comprising a built-in synthesiser and sampler) – with Mark McKeague and Joseph Pleass as Dentaku Ltd – to much public acclaim, also in 2013. In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired this work as well as Colour Chasers in their permanent collection.

Exhibition Launch: Wednesday 22 November 2017 6-8.30pm.

Prior to the launch Céline Condorelli will be in conversation with Prem Krishnamurthy at 5.30pm / All welcome

P!CKER Programme breakdown:

PART I: Elaine Lustig Cohen Looking Backward to Look Forward
28 September – 11 November 2017

Exhibition changeover
14 – 18 November 2017
During the changeover, the show will stay open to the public

PART II Céline Condorelli Prologue
23 November 2017 – 3 February 2018

P!CKER proffers a particular proposition: that curating, design, and other artistic pursuits in our present times must eschew the promotion of perfect products, instead presenting the creative process itself, with its plurality of positive outcomes and periodic faux pas.

This peculiar statement connects the activities of Stanley Picker Gallery, whose programme embraces the intersections of art and design within a university context, with that of P!, a hybrid exhibition space and ‘Mom-and-Pop-Kunsthalle’ that existed in New York City from 2012–2017. Founded by designer, curator, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy, P! operated with a quixotic drive to remake conventions of exhibition display, reexamine the relationship between aesthetics and political agendas, and reconsider accepted boundaries of contemporary creative practice.

With this collaborative context, P!CKER emerges as a series of two solo exhibitions – presenting polymathic practitioners Elaine Lustig Cohen and Céline Condorelli – alongside a programme of activities. Building off P!’s five year exhibition history while pointing towards future pursuits, the exhibition offers alternative models for considering interdisciplinary pedagogy and ways to work within the world.

P!CKER, PART II

Céline Condorelli Prologue

Céline Condorelli’s exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery extends Epilogue, her closing show at P! in New York City (May-June 2017). Taking the history of P! as part of the exhibition narrative, Prologue opens up new readings of past actions.

Comprising existing and newly commissioned works reflecting on legacy and transmission, Prologue also builds upon the inherited remainders of the preceding exhibition, P!CKER, PART I – Elaine Lustig Cohen: Looking Backward to Look Forward. One direct link is Bauhaus-trained designer and artist Herbert Bayer’s Extended Field of Vision drawing (1930). Highly influential in its time – and now emblematic of an entire era of exhibition design – the work points to blind spots within Bayer’s ambiguous position during the rise of national Socialism, as well as his later reticence to acknowledge this compromise.

Condorelli’s show questions Bayer’s legacy and P!’s own institutional story. The original flooring from P! is laid out, displaying marks accumulated over five-years of exhibition making. A series of abstract, window-scale vinyls frame the views between the gallery and its immediate surroundings. These recall Condorelli’s previous intervention on the storefront of P!, as pictured in a new edition, It’s All True, Too.

Other pieces, such as Alteration to Existing Conditions, consider the setting of the gallery space, addressing Bayer’s isolated focus on sight directly. An upholstered seating unit carries tactility and softness, offering visitors the possibility to rest, converse, and observe.

A series of discursive events informed by Condorelli’s research unfold over the course of the exhibition. David Scott’s newly commissioned text, ‘Intellectual Friendship’, appeared as part of the gallery’s anniversary mailout in September 2017, framing the concerns of dialogue, development, and interchange embedded within the the entire project.

Céline Condorelli (CH, FR, IT, UK) is an artist based in London. Recent exhibitions include Proposals for a Qualitative Society (Spinning), Stroom Den Haag, NL, Corps á Corps, IMA Brisbane, Australia in 2017; 11th Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial 2016, 20th Biennale of Sydney, and Concrete Distractions, Kunsthalle Lissabon in 2016; bau bau, HangarBicocca, Milan in 2015; as well as Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery, London, Positions, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the publication The Company She Keeps with Bookworks in 2014. Previous exhibitions include Puppet Show (various venues, 2014), Additionals, Project Art Centre, Dublin, as well as exhibitions at venues ranging from the Grazer Kunstverein, Hessel Museum, Castello di Rivoli, SALT Istanbul, LUMA Arles, and others. She is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan, and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, as well as the author and editor of Support Structures, published by Sternberg Press (2009/2014).

Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) works between design, curating, writing, and teaching. As Founding Principal of Project Projects, he received the Cooper Hewitt’s 2015 National Design Award for Communication Design, the USA’s highest recognition in the field, for his work with museums, artists, architects, and educational institutions. From 2012–2017, Prem established and curated the multidisciplinary exhibition space P! in New York City’s Chinatown, and has independently organized shows and programs at Para Site (Hong Kong), SALT Beyoglu (Istanbul), and Austrian Cultural Forum New York. His writing on exhibition histories has appeared in journals such as The Exhibitionist and in catalogues for the Art Institute of Chicago and CCA Watts. Recent books as co-editor include MATRIX/Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Prem is on faculty at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies and Barnard College. His experimental, interactive monograph/memoir/manifesto, P!DF, was published by O-R-G in September 2017. http://o-r-g.com/apps/p-df

P!CKER Full programme breakdown:

PART I: Elaine Lustig Cohen Looking Backward to Look Forward
28 September – 11 November 2017
Launch: Wednesday 27 September, 6-8.30pm / All welcome

Exhibition changeover
14 – 18 November 2017
During the changeover, the show will stay open to the public

PART II Céline Condorelli Prologue
23 November 2017 – 27 January 2018
Launch: Wednesday 22 November, 6-8.30pm. Conversation between Condorelli and Krishnamurthy 5.30pm / All welcome

P!CKER proffers a particular proposition: that curating, design, and other artistic pursuits in our present times must eschew the promotion of perfect products, instead presenting the creative process itself, with its plurality of positive outcomes and periodic faux pas.

This peculiar statement connects the activities of Stanley Picker Gallery, whose programme embraces the intersections of art and design within a university context, with that of P!, a hybrid exhibition space and ‘Mom-and-Pop-Kunsthalle’ that existed in New York City from 2012–2017. Founded by designer, curator, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy, P! operated with a quixotic drive to remake conventions 
of exhibition display, reexamine the relationship between aesthetics and political agendas, and reconsider accepted boundaries of contemporary creative practice.

With this collaborative context, P!CKER emerges as a series of two solo exhibitions – presenting polymathic practitioners Elaine Lustig Cohen and Céline Condorelli – alongside a programme of activities. Building off P!’s five year exhibition history while pointing towards future pursuits, the exhibition offers alternative models for considering interdisciplinary pedagogy and ways to work within the world.

P!CKER, PART I


Elaine Lustig Cohen Looking Backward to Look Forward

How do we take stock of a multifaceted creative life that never stood still? Over six decades of practice, Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927–2016) moved between diverse activities including design, art-making, art dealing, archiving, collecting, and researching. While she is known most widely for her groundbreaking graphic design work from the 1950s and 1960s, which extended the vocabulary
of European modernism to an American context, the visibility of her rigorous body of artwork has grown substantially over the past years. Always changing, Lustig Cohen shifted from hard-edged abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s into photographic collage, work on paper, sculptural assemblage, and alphabetical experimentation in her later decades. Her visual output developed in close ‘intellectual friendship’ with leading writers, architects, designers, and artists of her time.

Reflecting this open spirit, P!CKER, Part I – Lustig Cohen’s first solo exhibition in Great Britain – positions her practice within an experimental framework. Conceived and designed by Prem Krishnamurthy of P!, who worked closely with the artist during her last years, the exhibition focuses on a small selection from Lustig Cohen’s prodigious production alongside other objects, documents, and displays from her final exhibitions and collaborations. Presented subjectively 
and acknowledging its own gaps, the show aims to be generative rather than definitive – asking questions about the work on
view and suggesting pathways for further research.

A series of reading groups, informed by Lustig Cohen’s work, her literary interests, and other theoretical and philosophical strands, take place over the course of the exhibition. In November, the show transforms into Prologue: a solo presentation by Céline Condorelli, which overlaps in content and concerns with Epilogue, the closing exhibition at P! from Spring 2017.

It seems sometimes the future arrives before the past.

Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927–2016) was widely celebrated in her life as a graphic designer, artist, art dealer, and archivist. Her multifaceted accomplishments encompass pioneering design projects that extended the aesthetic vocabulary of European modernism into an American context, including commissions with clients such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum, and architects Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Richard Meier; to exhibitions as an artist at Bard College, Exit Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Mary Boone Gallery (first solo show by a female artist); to founding the influential Upper East Side bookstore Ex Libris, specialized in avant-garde publications and ephemera. She enjoyed a renewed interest in her practice in later years, including receiving the 2011 AIGA Medal for her life’s work in design, as well as mounting exhibitions at LACMA, Los Angeles (2016); The Glass House, New Canaan (2015), and P!, New York (2014). In 2018–2019, her interdisciplinary work will be the subject of a multi-venue ‘constellation of exhibitions’ at The Jewish Museum, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts Great Hall, and other New York institutions.

Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) works between design, curating, writing, and teaching. As Founding Principal of Project Projects, he received the Cooper Hewitt’s 2015 National Design Award for Communication Design, the USA’s highest recognition in the field, for his work with museums, artists, architects, and educational institutions. From 2012–2017, Prem established and curated the multidisciplinary exhibition space P! in New York City’s Chinatown, and has independently organized shows and programs at Para Site (Hong Kong), SALT Beyoglu (Istanbul), and Austrian Cultural Forum New York. His writing on exhibition histories has appeared in journals such as The Exhibitionist and in catalogues for the Art Institute of Chicago and CCA Watts. Recent books as co-editor include MATRIX/Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Prem is on faculty at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies and Barnard College. His experimental, interactive monograph/memoir/manifesto, P!DF, was published by O-R-G in September 2017. http://o-r-g.com/apps/p-df

31 Candles is an exhibition by American artists Jessi Reaves (b.1986) and Bradley Kronz (b.1986). Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, this new body of work is conceived site-specifically for Dorich House Museum, the Gallery’s partner venue and former studio home of the Russian sculptor, artist and designer Dora Gordine and her husband the Hon. Richard Hare, a scholar of Russian art and literature. The exhibition features new works by Reaves as well as new collaborative sculptures by Reaves & Kronz (Waiting for Boots), presented across four rooms in which the displays of furniture and items from the Museum collection have been partially reconfigured as part of the artists’ intervention.

Jessi Reaves’s sculptures, exhibited in the bright, Richmond Park-facing Modeling Studio, disregard divisions between the functional and the aesthetic. Padded Cabinet (2017) takes a twentieth-century modular shelf unit, which may have been designed by Gordine, as a substrate to be undermined and layered with new meaning as classic craftsmanship and fabrication techniques are challenged and bent towards unintended purposes. At the centre of the room, the three elements forming Java Haunt Ottoman w/ Parked Chair (2017) create a parallel stage to the existing one, upon which a series of bronze heads are lined up, right to the edge. Partly due to their positioning in this room, which indirectly echoes gestures and habits from the House’s past, Reaves’ works are endowed with a sympathetic and welcoming attitude towards the actions they seemingly invite in, whether it be resting or touching the textured finish.

Informed by the tendency to imbue objects with personal meaning, Kronz and Reaves’ artworks populate the Museum with a performative and menacing energy. A new ‘boots’ series sit among Gordine’s figurative bronzes, in the first floor Gallery. Comprising of re-purposed materials, such as stacked flight cases and vintage fur boots, these visual compositions mimic the forms and proportions of the historical statues and their elegant display-plinths. Held together by fabric corsets, the pairs of boots result in collapsed, headless bodies that complement and contrast, equally, with Gordine’s head-portraits. Around the corner, a few battered shoeboxes casually rest on the antique Russian sofa, exposing a sense of relaxed informality in the artist’s use of these once-domestic precious objects.

Ascending to the private and more intimate rooms of the top floor flat, a dramatic shift in atmosphere comes into effect as Reaves and Kronz involve house features, such as curtains and lighting, in the presentation of their works. In the background, Baby (2017), a looped-sound piece, overlays the persistent cry of a small child – a recording taken by Reaves several years ago during a long plane journey – with the seemingly soothing, or perhaps rather exasperating, major chords played by a piano. Five new sculptures orbit Dora Gordine’s Seated Baby (1937-38) in the Living room, one of her early public commission, accompanied by its original plinth. Originally created for the Westminster Council Maternity and Child Welfare Centre and Day Nursery, Pimlico, this work had been in private hands for a number of years until the Museum acquired it in 2016.

Facing the Dining room, Seated Baby is in eye contact with Kronz and Reaves’ Mother Figure (2017), placed on top of the dining table to achieve adult-like height. Making use of the building and its objects as a total display system, Kronz and Reaves’ improvised methods bring an alternative, playful perspective to the scale and nature of the House and its evolution through periods of domesticity, professional work, abandonment and academic use. This is the second iteration of their collaborative project, the first one in the UK.

Jessi Reaves (b. 1986, Portland, Oregon; lives in New York) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her work has been included in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, in venues including Team Gallery, New York; Swiss Institute, New York; Herald St, London; and A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy. In 2016, Reaves presented her first solo exhibition with Bridget Donahue, New York, and was most recently included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Bradley Kronz (b. 1986, San Diego, California; lives in New York) received his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, in venues including Matthew Gallery, Berlin; High Art, Paris; A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy; Essex Street, New York.

Located a ‘Deer’s Leap’ from Richmond Park, Dorich House Museum, one of London hidden gems, is the former studio home of the Russian sculptor, artist and designer Dora Gordine and her husband the Hon. Richard Hare, a scholar of Russian art and literature. Now Grade II listed, the building was completed in 1936, to Gordine’s design, and is an exceptional example of a modern studio house created by a female artist as a space in which to live and work. Following Gordine’s death in 1991, Dorich House was acquired and renovated by Kingston University and is now open to the public as a museum, operating as an international centre to promote and support women creative practitioners. Artist Hilary Lloyd was appointed the inaugural Dorich House Fellow in autumn 2015, with her solo exhibition, Awful Girls presented 8 March – 29 April 2017.

Stanley Picker Gallery is pleased to announce Yemi Awosile’s first solo exhibition, Orishirishi. Appointed Stanley Picker Design Fellow in 2015, Awosile has developed a new body of research that casts a lens on the insatiable desire to maintain a sense of place and ownership over one’s identity through outward public personas. The title of the show is a Nigerian (Yoruba) word taken from Awosile’s family tribe’s vocabulary, loosely meaning ‘an assortment of different things’. Her new collection of textiles classifies materials as an arrangement of experiences and comprises of both fabrics and, for the first time, garments created through the combination of various techniques, such as multi-media printing and acoustic textiles.

Responding to the architectural layout of the Gallery, Awosile stages a very specific moment of the experience of a clothes shop by introducing a series of changing rooms accompanied by large mirrors, a seating area with African fashion magazines, and furniture pieces displaying clothing and blocks made of iroko – a large hardwood tree from the west coast of Africa that can live up to 500 years and is believed to have supernatural properties – employed by the artist to block-print patterns. As socially-coded, designated areas for changing one’s clothes away from other people’s eyes, dressing rooms provide opportunities for engaging with and and styling one’s public image in private; changing persona through choices of clothing.

Reflecting on fashion, textiles and the built environment, Orishirishi looks at unexpected parallels between different social groups. Interested in the social implications of cross-cultural identities, during her Fellowship research Awosile travelled to Delhi to work with a group of young people and Indian artist Aastha Chauhan from Khirkee – an urban village within the larger metropolis, whose community is built around enterprising ventures and a culturally fluid neighbourhood. In amongst the cheap homes and a multitude of Indian migrate workers, a large African community resides and a new sub-culture is emerging based on a rich fusion of African and Indian influences. Awosile ran a number of workshops with Chauhan and activities to help the young people elaborate an identity for their music band Khirkee17 and design their logos, prints and branded merchandise. In exchange, the boys, who spoke a little bit of English, guided Awosile through the challenges of being new to Delhi and not speaking Hindi, and helped her gather research material, including sound recordings which are played as soundscapes through the acoustic textiles.

Awosile’s work highlights unexpected, cross-cultural parallels and builds an enquiry into the migratory movement of people. Working with textiles becomes instrumental in understanding the social significance of clothing as a tool for building and expressing collective narratives. In both Indian and Nigerian cultures, print is a primary medium to facilitate storytelling through image and process. Over the past months Awosile experimented with and subverted traditional Indian and Nigerian block-printing techniques to create new patterns that play with historical and contemporary representations in popular culture.

Historically, it was far easier to identify a piece of textile by region, on the basis of pattern or techniques applied. This custom sits in sharp contrast with today’s large scale, industrial productions of clothing, whereby it is hardly possible to determine roots and cultural identity of any given material. As we live in a world where the notion of ‘Made in’ becomes increasingly blurred, Orishirishi raises questions on what impact this process might have on how people create and perceive their own identity within society.
During the course of the exhibition, Khirkee17 merchandise will be available to purchase in support of their future activities.

Yemi Awosile is a multi-disciplinary designer living and working in London. Her work is informed by cultural insights expressed primarily through textiles and printed matter. The broader scope of her practice bridges design and visual arts through social interventions. Recent projects include collaborations with Tent Rotterdam, Tate Gallery and Contemporary And (C&) magazine. She trained as a textile designer at the Royal College of Art and Chelsea College of Art. She is a visiting tutor at Loughborough University and Chelsea College of Art.

Having explored issues of cumulative labor, exhibition display, and support structures through her practice as an artist, teacher and co-founder of Eastside Projects in Birmingham, UK, Céline Condorelli presents her first US solo show, Epilogue, as the final project at the Broome Street storefront of P! Epilogue also marks the start of a collaboration between P! and Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University London. Staged across the two venues throughout 2017, the overall project draws parallels and contrasts between the work of Condorelli and the late designer and artist Elaine Lustig Cohen.

Within Condorelli’s practice, thinking and producing are conjoined. This exhibition assembles pre-existing and newly commissioned works, alongside a program of discursive events, to consider how history, politics, and individual ethics temper the judgments of artistic legacy.

At the heart of the exhibition is Bauhaus-trained designer and artist Herbert Bayer’s Extended Field of Visiondrawing (1930), borrowed from a private collection for Condorelli’s project. Highly influential in its time—and now emblematic of an entire era of exhibition design—the drawing features an exaggerated eye atop a male visitor’s body that observes planes of display in every direction. Yet the work also points to several blind spots within existing histories: Bayer’s ambiguous position during the rise of National Socialism, compounded by his later reticence to acknowledge this compromise. Furthermore, the focus on sight alone highlights inherent exclusions within such a disembodied understanding of exhibitions.

Condorelli exhibits works that reflect on Bayer’s legacy and P!’s institutional narrative. An abstract, window-scale vinyl frames the views between storefront and street. This is complemented by a multi-layered print on acrylic glass in a custom hinged frame, which hides and reveals simultaneously. Within the storefront, a series of large-scale drawings catalogue Condorelli’s practice to date, as both documentation and extension of past works.

Other sculptural pieces relate to the conditions of the gallery space and directly address Bayer’s drawing. For Alteration to Existing Conditions, Condorelli recycles fragments from P!’s display architecture, which are repurposed within an upholstered seating unit for visitors to rest, converse, and observe. Constructed from locally-sourced corrugated plastic, a sculptural room divider / curtain, Epilogue, articulates the show’s space while adding a further layer of color and transparency.

The exhibition’s final work greets the street: set in a custom typeface, the storefront awning spells after in reverse. This simple preposition evokes the afterlives and legacies of exhibition spaces—as ongoing loops of production and display, in which works and ideas initiate new contexts for others to inhabit. In this spirit, the exhibition will travel to Stanley Picker Gallery as part of a broader project, continuing the spirit of P! within a different forum.

Céline Condorelli (CH, FR, IT, UK) is an artist based in London. Recent exhibitions include 11th Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial 2016, 20th Biennale of Sydney, and Concrete Distractions, Kunsthalle Lissabon in 2016; bau bau, HangarBicocca, Milan in 2015; as well as Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery, London, Positions, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the publication The Company She Keeps with Bookworks in 2014. Previous exhibitions include Puppet Show (various venues, 2014), Additionals, Project Art Centre, Dublin, as well as exhibitions at venues ranging from the Grazer Kunstverein, Hessel Museum, Castello di Rivoli, SALT Istanbul, LUMA Arles, and others. She is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan, and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, as well as the author and editor of Support Structures, published by Sternberg Press (2009/2014).

Events program

Exhibition opening reception
Sunday, 23 April, 4–8pm

“What comes after?”
Conversation with Céline Condorelli, Robert Wiesenberger, Stella Bottai, and Prem Krishnamurthy
Sunday, 23 April, 4pm

Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968
Book launch and conversation with James Voorhies, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, and Prem Krishnamurthy
Sunday, 30 April, 4pm

“With distance”
Conversation with Kristie La, Céline Condorelli, and Prem Krishnamurthy on Herbert Bayer and the politics of exhibition design
Saturday, 20 May, 2pm

Exactly twenty years since its inaugural exhibition in February 1997, the Stanley Picker Gallery building reflects back upon itself, through a group show bringing together an architectural intervention by Simon Martin, a site-specific commission by Augustas Serapinas, and a series of photographic studies of the Picker House interiors by Bridget Smith.

Simon Martin is Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow at Kingston University. Building upon his past work on subjectivity and the built environment, he is currently undertaking new research around ideas of Objecthood, sound and memory. For this exhibition the artist has intervened in the current layout of the venue as an artistic gesture which nods to the Gallery’s past. Through a simple act of reinstating the original entrance, exposing previously hidden windows, and removing all artificial lighting, Martin reconfigures the building and its navigation, returning its essential architectural status, and highlighting its island location along the Hogsmill River, opposite Kingston School of Art.

Augustas Serapinas’ practice is invested in recomposing socially engaged spaces, in order to foreground and problematise the assumptions that shape them. By inverting the customary functions of objects and spatiality, Serapinas toys with the possibilities of the encounter – with art and with the social relations it engenders – as a phenomenon and an opportunity. Serapinas’ new commission at Stanley Picker Gallery is a secret space, entrusted by the artist to the infrastructure of the organisation, including its staff. As the project evolves over the course of the exhibition, its secrecy also transforms oscillating between facts and rumours.

In juxtaposition to the minimal intervention in the main exhibition space, Bridget Smith’s series of six photographs creates a unique portrait of the Picker House’s strikingly designed interiors. Stanley Picker, the arts patron after whom our Gallery is named, lived there until his death in 1982. The domestic setting remains immaculately preserved, very much as it was when Stanley resided there with his life-partner Paul Kavanagh. Smith’s images respond to the theatrical sensibility of the House, moving from the more public spaces filled with daylight and warm orange furnishings to the yellow and green subterranean light of the private rooms. To commemorate its 20th anniversary, the Gallery has produced a postcard edition of these six images, forming part of a special episodic mail-out designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, released over the course of 2017.

Simon Martin was born in Cheshire, England in 1965, and lives and works in London. Selected solo exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre, London (2015); Focal Point Gallery, Southend- on-Sea (offsite commission 2014); Kunstverein Amsterdam, Amsterdam (2010); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2008); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2006); White Columns, New York (2005). Selected group exhibitions include JAGUARS AND ELECTRIC EELS, Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin (2017); The Parliament of Things, Firstsite, Colchester (2015); The Event Sculpture, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2014); Glasgow International, Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow (2014); The Imaginary Museum, Kunstverein, Munich (with Ed Atkins) (2012); Martin was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award (2008) and shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2009), and received the Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellowship in 2015.

Augustas Serapinas was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1990, and lives and works in Vilnius. He attended the Rupert Educational Program in Vilnius, LT (2014) and completed a BA Fine Arts from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius, LT (2013) and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK (2013). Recent exhibitions include Dusting the Grounds, David Roberts Art Foundation (London, UK – 2016); Philip, Lukas & Isidora, SALTS (Basel, CH – 2015); Double Bind, Rupert (Vilnius, LT – 2015); 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, (Moscow, RU – 2015) and The Future of Memory. An Exhibition on the Infinity of the Present Time, Kunsthalle Wien, (Vienna, AU, 2015).

Bridget Smith was born in Essex, England, in 1966. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Swedenborg Society, London. Selected exhibitions include Frith Street Gallery, London (solo) (2016); Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (solo) (2015); Now It Is Permitted: 24 Wayside Pulpits, Swedenborg House, London, Lovin’ it, Bromer Art Collection, Roggwil, Switzerland (group) (2013); The Occupants: Contemporary Perspectives on the Picker House, Stanley Picker Gallery, London (group) (2012); Peer, London (solo) (2010); Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (solo) (2008); Stardust or the Last Frontier, Musée D’art Contemporain, Val de Marne (group) (2007); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea (solo) (2006)

“Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class; in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations, no future, no past.”
Sadie Plant Preamble from Zeroes + Ones (4th Estate London, 1997)

The Ancient Greeks had two distinct concepts relating to notions of time. Whilst Chronos referred to chronological time, Kairos signified a ‘time-lapse’; an indeterminate time in which everything happens at once, in the present moment. The human instinct of marking the present with an improvised act of creativity is the supreme moment of the ‘now’, manifest through the urgent, demonstrative act of self-expression; the gesture, the strike, the cut, the mark, the holler.

Inspired by Sadie Plant’s seminal book Zeros + Ones (1997), Kairos by Anat Ben-David is a theatrical song-cycle bringing together performers and musicians from the worlds of opera, electronic and experimental composition, in a futuristic staging created with avant-garde fashion studio Boudicca. Following the poetic schema of Zeros + Ones through a cycle of nine songs, Kairos makes reference to technological developments, post-humanist writings and cybernetic theories.

Over recent years, artist-musician Anat Ben-David has evolved a hybrid working practice she calls OpeRaaRt, developing ‘sonic images’ shaped through dynamic combinations of sound, word and movement.  Her live performance and solo album MeleCh was launched at Stanley Picker Gallery in 2014.

Kairos is specially commissioned to celebrate 20 years of the Stanley Picker Gallery. The project was devised through a series of collaborative workshops, and previewed at Stanley Picker Gallery in January 2017. Kairos received its first major public presentation on Wed 5 July 2017 as part of the Reveal Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with individual song recitals on the hour from 10am-5pm and a full performance at 6.30pm (90 mins).

Kairos:                   Duration 90 mins

Act I                        Preamble / I Say That That / Ordinary Song

Act II                       Icaros / Better Scenery / Methusalach

Act III                      Anna Freud / Time Improvisation / Herself

Credits:

Written & Directed by Anat Ben-David

Art Direction & Costume by Boudicca

Musical Arrangment by Anat Ben-David & Tom Milsom

Methusalach – Music by Tom Milsom & Anat Ben-David
Better Scenery – Words by Sean Ashton
Preamble – Words based on a text from Zeros + Ones (1997) by Sadie Plant

Moving Image by Anat Ben-David

Stills Photography by Jet

Profound respect and thanks to Sadie Plant for inspiration

Performers:

Voice – Anat Ben-David, Bishi, Anna Dennis, Sharon Gal, Katie Morel-Orchard, Richard Scott
Piano and Keyboard – Tom Milsom
Electronics – Ivan Lapse
Violin – Angharad Davies
Trombone – Hilary Jeffery
Percussion – Serge Vuille

Additional Performers V&A Reveal Festival:

Voice – Wiliam Purefoy
Trombone – Owen Dawson
Trumpet – Daniel Walton
Cello – Ute Kanngiesser

Production & Crew:

Production Manager – Adi Nachman
Lighting Design – Azusa Ono
Sound Mixer – Joel Cahen
Projection Operator – Rob MacPherson
Hair & Makeup – Kennaland
Costume Assistant – Alex Watts, Ames Rushfirth, Marcela Baltarete, Alejandro Virgos,Thibaut Knapp, Tabitha Ringwood, Hernan Guardamagna

Many thanks to Kennaland for hair styling and Cafe Oto Project Space for rehearsal space.

Biographies:

Anat Ben-David is an artist, musician, performer and collaborative member of the artist-band Chicks On Speed. Completing her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2014, her creative interests lie in the relationships between text, sound and digital image, mediated through improvisation and performance. Ben-David’s shows and collaborations have been presented internationally at Tate Britain, London; ICA, London; Stanley Picker Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Migros Museum, Zurich; Borealis Festival, Bergen; Beursschouwburg, Brussels; MoMAK, Kyoto; Montermeso, Vitoria; Mosak, and ZKM, Karlsruhe.

Boudicca is an avant-garde studio founded in 1997 by Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby, whose innovative work eloquently yet disobediently explores the creative territories between and beyond the worlds of art and design. Presenting collections in London and New York, they became the first independent British fashion house to be invited to the prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in 2007.  In 2012 they exhibited in Fashioning the Object at the Art Institute of Chicago, collaborated with filmmaker Mike Figgis at the Royal Opera House and were awarded a Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University London. Broach is Head of Fashion at the Royal College of Art.

Daily Activities / All Welcome
Yoga: every Tuesday, 10-11am
Evening talks: Wednesdays, 5-7pm: 19 Oct, 26 Oct, 9 Nov
Featuring Alessandro Gandini, Heidi Seetzen, Jack Self, Precarious Workers Brigade
Closing party: Saturday 12 Nov, 3-7pm
Free / Booking recommended, please email: stanleypickergallery@kingston.ac.uk

As the result of his  Stanley Picker Design Fellowship  research (2014-16), Onkar Kular transforms the gallery into the  Stanley Picker Creators Academy  (SPCA).

Over recent years there has been a global rise in new types of creative working environments, from co-working and creative office hub spaces as seen in Wework and Second Home, to large-scale workplaces of media organisations, such as Google and Facebook.

Terms like Collaboration, Sharing and Community are commonly found in the branding and mission statements of organisations that provide or facilitate such working spaces. These reflect a certain ethos, generally focused around how they support and incubate individuals to work more efficiently, create more professional content, and ultimately access more lucrative opportunities and financial capital.

Collaboration, Sharing and Community are the working values that are reconsidered as part of the SPCA. By staging the spatial and organisational features normally found in creative working environments, the SPCA examines how these terms are used by organisations to incubate creativity and suggest possible ways that they can be refocused and repurposed in order to create alternative forms of capital.

Designed together with architect Inigo Minns, the SPCA includes different zones for work, booths for meeting and conference calling, brainstorming and hot-desking stations, fast Internet connection together with areas for relaxing and socialising. Operating an ‘Open Use’ policy, the SPCA offers a free working space available for Kingston University staff, students, as well as the general public.

Alongside the many spatial features, creative work organisations often run events programmes for the purpose of general inspiration and staff development. The SPCA reflects this with its own ‘carefully  curated programme’ to host a series of public activities; including talks, yoga classes and various networking opportunities. Additionally the SPCA explores the core values of Collaboration, Sharing and Community through workshops for local charitable organisations, schools and community groups as well as Kingston University students and staff.

Onkar Kular’s research investigates how contemporary design practice, its processes, methodologies and outputs, can be used as a medium to engage with social and cultural issues. Using a range of different media to include objects, films, events, performances and installations his research is disseminated internationally through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, film festivals and publications. His work is in the collection of the CNAP, France and he has also guest curated the exhibitions Crafting Narrative for the Crafts Council UK and The Citizens Archive of Pakistan for the British Council at the Royal Festival Hall. Onkar Kular was the 2014 Stanley Picker Design Fellow at Kingston University, and is currently a Professor in Design Interventions at HDK, Gothenburg University.

Project Architect: Inigo Minns
Graphic Designer: Naho Matsuda
Project Assistant: Thomas Marriott

The Stanley Picker Creators Academy would also like to thank Natalie Kay and Joseph l’Anson for their collaboration and contributions.