WE ARE PUBLICATION
t h e H O L D
Stanley Picker Gallery
26 September – 14 December 2019
Opening Wednesday, 25 September, 6 – 8.30pm
For their exhibition t h e H O L D, We Are Publication will realise a series of interconnected projects expanding on the group’s central preoccupations around cut-up, fragmentation and modes of collective re-composition and assemblage.
Photography Ellie Laycock
Gallery text:
t h e H O L D is an exhibition by the artists’ group We Are Publication (WAP) featuring contributions from over 50 artists. It consists of posters, a soundscape, a hand-woven carpet, and a series of live events all set within an expansive sculptural display structure occupying the gallery space.
The poster is a key production site for WAP and provides an important working-tool for collective visual and conceptual dialogue. Contributed materials are grouped and regrouped, with salient conversations between component parts gradually taking hold. At the Stanley Picker Gallery, this process of contingent reassembling is accentuated through a multiplicity of spliced and overlapped poster material.
The exhibition’s primary structure is formed from steel decking of the type commonly used for theatrical stage and exhibition design; its modular character mirrors WAP’s own combinatory approach to artistic production. Suggestive of a schematic mountain-scape, the structure grips and scales the gallery’s own vertiginous architecture, encouraging metaphoric ascents, descents and transversal movement.
Preoccupations with mountainous landscapes are further taken up by t h e H O L D’s soundscape whose indeterminate atmospheres take their cue from the secluded alpine sanatorium described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924). Individual sonic contributions are here re-imagined as if circulating within the spaces of a remote mountain refuge, where acoustic fragments pass and mingle via a series of rest-cures, breakfasts, luncheons and dinners, eventually to disperse in slumber.
Part home-furnishing, part-collage, a custom-made handwoven rug was central to WAP’s Notes on a Carpet project between 2017-18. The carpet itself re-alights here, as well as in the form of live-stream video documentation of one of its previous manifestations.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, t h e H O L D will host a series of live events with key performances taking place on the 6th of November and the 4th of December.
contributors include: Jonathan Allen, Holly Antrum, Bill Balaskas, Sarah Bennett, George Charman, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins, Ilsa Colsell, Craig Cooper, Edward Dorrian, Volker Eichelmann, Abbe Fletcher, Adam Gillam, Keira Greene, Bruce Haines, Felicity Hammond, Mark Harris, Ayano Hattori, John Hughes, James Irwin, Gareth Jones, Simon Josebury, Marianne Keating, Dean Kenning, Lau Chak Kwong, John Lawrence, Bill Leslie, Anna Lucas, Stine Ljungdalh, Katy Macleod, Rachel Mader, Russell Miller, Christian Newby, Louis Nixon, Tom O’Dea, Alex Pollard, Elizabeth Price, Mónica Rivas Velásquez, Joey Ryken, Daniel Shanken, Andrea Stokes, Stephen Sutcliffe, Charlotte Warne Thomas, Andy Tam, Erika Tan, Mandy Ure, Sebastian Utzni, Roman Vasseur, Mark Aerial Waller, Steven Warwick, Matt Williams.
We Are Publication: Live Event
Wednesday 6 November 6-8pm | All Welcome
We Are Publication: (Edges of) a close/d screening
Thursday 21 November 6-8.30pm | All Welcome
Further details: https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/exhibitions/we-are-publication/
Stanley Picker Gallery
Kingston School of Art, Grange Road
Kingston upon Thames KT1 2QJ
Centre for Useless Splendour 