Press Release
CENTREFOLD:
So, You're
Afraid of What?
Curated by Reza Aramesh and Tina Spear
Artists
Jonathan Allen / Reza Aramesh
/ Sarah Baker /
Diann Bauer / Lali Chetwynd
/ Doug Fishbone /
HK119 / Andy Ming-Yen
Hsu / Seb Patane /
Giles Round / John Russell
/ Tina Spear /
Francis Upritchard
You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition
'So You're
Afraid of What?' curated by
Reza Aramesh and Tina Spear,
at ®edux
on 7th October 2004 7.00pm-9.00pm.
After-Party till 2.00am
Bar DJ Video.
Centrefold's third edition,'So
You're Afraid Of What?'
departs from previous incarnations as a scrapbook,
by extending additionally into gallery space.
The unfolding process can be read as a kind of document and
a critique of both the reproduced image and the white cube
itself. Artists present their
work in a collective form,
the 'group show',
which can be viewed all 'at
once'. The crossing over from
a linear reading to the multiple sightlines of the installation
discloses an unconscious production at work about 'the
familiar'.
The old references apparently long dead are re-instated
in the directness of a question that presses 'safe'
aesthetic issues up against their immediate 'unsafe'
social context. At the same
time the question of safety calls up the contemporary forms
of spectatorship (magazine,
gallery and living space) as
subject of a more welcome scrutiny,
getting 'inside-out',
as pages become walls, floors
and ceilings, which in turn
are transformed as souvenirs,
stapled together and reproduced as a transversatile aesthetic
object. Subjects become objects,
not 'art'
ones as such, but ones always
part of 'life'.
The project is readable only by being continuous with the
world and its objects. So each
time a different group of artists are brought together,
it is by association or by chance encounters in individual
relationships. A new question
is raised about, say,
belonging. This time it just
happens to be 'so you're
afraid of what?' It could be
more banal.'When did you first
meet Josh?' The individual
is over-estimated,
and his public confession will appear as a lie,
empty in an empty situation.
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The question 'so you're
afraid of what?' meets the
world's free-floating
fears with malign neutrality.
Its openly glamorous appeal situates itself happily between
a mash-up of stylishly indifferent
answers, beaten up opinions
and quasi-ideals.
With an appearance of disinterest,
where appearance is everything and nothing,
one just keeps asking the questions anyway,
despite the answers.
Centrefold, associated with
the dual process of producing a material object via a glamorous
image, is connoted at the point
at which both aspects become transversatile.
Its performance in the gallery context subscribes to a different
set of conventions from print,
ones already well documented and analysed in post-mortem
by Brian O'Doherty.
["Inside the White Cube; The Ideology of the Gallery
Space" University of California
Press, 1999.]
Aesthetic mutations, 'projects',
(is there a difference anymore?)
seldom originate from authoritarian spaces.
What unfolds can be imagined more fully in terms of the production
of duration of a living space.
Experiment demands that we do not know where we are heading.
The safe place of snapshot souvenirs is always out of time.
The question doubles up, killing
two birds with one stone. These
'unprinted'
pages (the scrapbooks are all
palpably unique, produced on
a small-scale)
get 'stapled'
to the collective fold of a social space.
Artist, art-work
and audience are held to a unifying principle,
relational to time, space,
colour, sex to manufacture
singularity. 'So You're
Afraid Of What?', unanswered
in dead time, cuts through
the reified air of the gallery with a knife.
Centrefold - So You're
Afraid Of What?
Exhibition runs through October.
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