Cell Project Space

This exhibition primarily refers to sculpture in a social space in direct relationship to architecture and the built environment. In the way that architecture is imaginative architects invent what is not there and yet must always begin with an idea of something located somewhere. This paradoxical situation suggests that all future projects have a past, just as present and previous ones do. The artists in this exhibition refer to this built environment whether successful or failed. They use the ‘established’, ‘the familiar’, or the utopian dream as their starting point. In ‘The Lobby’ the finished product is not a concern, but rather a project still in the process of being completed. 

 

Stefano Calligaro’s works, function as a means of understanding and navigating, developing compositions that find balance between two and three dimensions. Using the clinical ready-mades found amongst office stationary and utilitarian workplace fixtures his subtle installations hide and secrete ideas associated with modernist form and navigate the given surroundings. His making methods are embroiled in loose compositional arrangement. This instability creates a tension and a purpose for the work. 

 

 

Karen Cunningham makes art as hypothesis in which artworks are presented as propositions. Notions of social engagement, free will, and new ageism are overlapping themes within her work and can be summarised as an interest in the possibility of the ‘individual’ within society. The artworks act as possible entry points for communication or transformation seeking to evoke reciprocity of engagement with the viewer in an attempt to initiate an allegory outside of the work of art. Operating both as relic and as technology the materials used are specifically selected yet also generally available (such as rocks, sand, compact discs) this results in the works having a rudimentary aesthetic and a relationship with the viewer that is both ancient and contemporary.

 

 

Charles Danby’s paintings, drawings and constructed objects entertain contrivances of architectural structure and interior display and design, drawing on configurations of marks and materials that become functional across two and three dimensions. The works explore the way in which meanings are constructed and motifs become accepted visual components.

 

 

Lieke Snellen develops her work out of an empirical method, in which material and her direct surroundings play an important role. By assembling objects and material familiar to our daily lives, such as furniture, packaging, and building materials Snellen transforms the original meaning and context into an arrangement that refers to an architectural ideology. Emblematic motifs occur within her assemblages thus exploring and challenging our responses and questions to social and political space, these methods often used to shepherd and organise people. Snellens interventions probe the key function of monumental sculpture within architecture and how political and corporate display takes on an important role within the navigation of our built surrounding. Snellen inhabits a tension between the banal and the spectacular, the historical and the contemporary, constructing works with a sense of the monumental of the everyday.

 

 

Simon and Tom Bloor have had a long running interest in moments of utopian potential and their relationship to specific places. Crossing the boundaries between design, philosophy and social history the work of Simon & Tom Bloor moves beyond art’s continued fascination with the aesthetics of Modernism and into the uncertain territory of something more engaged with its social structures. Using a range of media they explore aspects of architecture, design and popular culture, especially in the light of obscure histories and flawed idealism. 

 

 

Francesca Nobilucci experiments with text, video, performance, and embroidery and ultimately sound which have been chosen for their immateriality. Nobilucci’s concerns are embedded in a desire to dematerialise the art object. In recent works Nobilucci has eliminated the DIY aspect of the process and openly introduced the use of specialists/fabricators to produce the work where possible, in order to explore the concept of simulacrum. Her work extends ideas and notions of artificiality. The results are varied and in some cases there is an attempt to make the artwork either disappear or to transform it into a pseudo-functional object such as Ikea furniture and other times into the vernacular of the ready-made manufactured object.

 

 

Mick Peter’s work is derived from his interest in monumental sculpture and emblems of stupidity. The objects in the show propose pairs of personalities as scratchy paradoxes in lumpen matter. Comprised of drawings and sculpture the work adopts the demented impulse driving the fabrication of urban amenities and public sculpture that leads people to choose to congregate amongst dirt, bad smells and every kind of abomination. His more recent works draw on a broad catalogue of literary and theoretical references. Often from European municipal illustration from the 1960’s his drawn-like sculptures of iconic motifs and signs often appear heavy and delicate at the same time and play with notions of solidity and lightness.