Grey Area presents 'occupant', a series of 3 week long artist residencies within the gallery which will each culminate in the making of new work and a public event.
The residencies will take place during successive weeks in November 2010, providing 3 selected artists/groups with the opportunity to occupy the gallery from Monday-Sunday of that same week. Grey Area will provide each occupant with the staples of space, tools, a timescale, and a set of keys.
The parameters for what might constitute an outcome for the occupant residencies are flexible and permeable. As much a process of the studio as of the gallery. Participants are invited to consider how their project may or may not be constituted as an object, subject, event, or non-event.
As each residency will have different times and degrees of public engagement, additional information on residency events will follow with little warning as the week of an Occupant takes shape. Grey Area was originally founded as a dual studio/gallery, and so Occupant marks a return of sorts – to concurrent processes of making and display. To occupy is to seize - a week, a residency, an exhibition. Or all 3.
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occupant Joseph Long
8th - 14th November 2010
Opening event: Saturday 13th November, 6-8pm
A process-based series of drawings using sheets of paper to collect the dust that falls within the gallery during the week long residency. Once the dust has settled, its location will be marked in pencil creating a map of the performance which has taken place. With this series of drawings I hope to create a material trace to document Grey Area as a result of the movements/performances that occurred whilst an occupant.
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occupant Rework painting zine
15th - 21st November 2010
Launch event: 20th November, 7-9pm
The Rework residency will culminate with a one-off exhibition/event to coincide with the launch of the first Rework zine, which will be created collaboratively and focus on the practice of painting and the constraints of the residency itself.
The first issue will be titled ‘Concrete Ephemera’ and respond to the idea of the veil in nocturnal phenomena as well as Magrette’s ‘ L'Empire des lumières’ (1949-64) – a series of paintings which blur the boundaries between day and night.
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occupant Carolyn Arnold
22nd - 28th November 2010
Opening event: Saturday 27th November, 6-9pm
The last few years has seen an increase in blockbuster films based on post-apocalyptic events over dystopian themes. Both involve social degradation but the former is the result of environmental changes. This is most interesting to me, as a visual/installation artist I am interested by space and surroundings, and effects on mood.
Within these films, essentially based on trauma, beauty is found, for example the desolate, pallid sweeping landscapes of The Road (2009). In The Book of Eli (2010) we find a shallower, trendier beauty as the stars strut in good sunglasses and big boots. Indeed in popular culture we find mirrored musings, in Vogue Dec-2010, milliner Nasir Mazhar imagines ‘the end of the world, and this girl happens to have a sexy space helmet’. A ludicrous vanity, but perhaps this is our humanity – our commitment to decorate and imagine.
But I wonder if we’re really getting the message. We consume at a terrific rate and we don’t really take personal responsibility for our collective damage.
Through my clothing I try to create an impression of my personality, but I get unstuck trying to represent the various sides: the tomboy, grafter, bohemian, career woman, girlfriend… all this before even the practicalities. My wardrobe heaves with clothes as I covet the designer labels and luxurious fabrics. But where am ‘I’ in these imagery?
This work is a reflection of modern living, routine and consumption through waste products, with inevitable doom that the planet doesn’t look and feel quite how we’d like it to, and societies don’t function quite how we’d like them to. As in the blockbusters, my mission is to find a hint of humanity, the individual, a sublime landscape, and yes, the ludicrous vanity of compulsive decoration.
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Grey Area, Basement, 31 Queens Rd, Brighton, BN13XA
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