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.

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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