ONE AND ONE AND ONE

A group exhibition that considers the idea of incompletion through the imagined and real spaces of architecture.
Amikam Toren | Bernice Donszelmann | Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers | Mary Maclean | Richard Healy | Ruth Proctor | Sally Morfill | Tim Renshaw | Yonatan Vinitsky

CGP London, Southwark Park, London SE16
26 September to 28 October 2012, Wednesday – Sunday from 12 – 6pm.

For ONE AND ONE AND ONE the participating artists explore the ambient qualities of architectural atmosphere through works that, through their process of production, offer a concept of space that is not static. Freed from reaching a point of conclusion (through the withholding of information), the resulting structures create an absence that generates new material languages.

At the heart of this exhibition, is the perception of the incomplete or a space that is begun and worked upon within its own particular suspended history. In this unsettling absence of concrete information or related historical context, audiences must engage with a willful open-endedness and confront distractions that bring their peripheral imagination into play and in which margins can touch, overlap, rub up against each other, but due to the different shapes of their limits they are bound to never fit into each other completely. Verwoert, J. 2007 Forget the National: Perform the International in the Key of the Local (and vice versa).

The works in this exhibition draw on concepts of architectural materiality, a hypothesis of space and our perception of the built environment. Even architecture, which disposes of the more solid materials is a hypothesis about space, in much the same sense that words on a page do not produce meaning directly but first divide the page and consequently thought and poetry, into significance. Said, E.1985. Beginnings Intention and Method.

Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonics of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special efforts which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment. Virilio, P. 1984 Negative Horizon.

Discussion Event Sunday 21 October from 3 –5pm at Dilston Grove | Southwark Park | Bermondsey

Conversing on the Incomplete

The incomplete and associated terms such as the fragment and the ruin have had a central place in discourse around the arts, architecture and contemporary experience, shifting away from ideals of wholeness and unity. Always dynamic and in process, incompleteness occupies a field of tension. The dialogic nature of the incomplete can be addressed through its elastic relation to time, doubling as a site of radical potential and the way it suggests an abandoned or eradicated historical continuum.

The theme of the incomplete and its related lines of enquiry will be developed in an afternoon of short talks by Ian Hunt, David Ryan and Ciara Healy. Ian Hunt is a writer and critic David Ryan is an artist, musician and writer Ciara Healy is an artist and writer.

Curated by Outside Architecture: Bernice Donszelmann, Tim Renshaw, Mary Maclean.

Projects include Outside Architecture, Stephen Lawrence Galley, London; Architectural Fictions, South Hill Park, Berkshire; Interior Life, Herbert Read Gallery, Kent; House in the Shape of a Stretcher, Five Years, London; Left of Place, Five Years, London.

Amikam Toren ‘Three years ago, Evelyn House (the house where I live) went through a major renovation. Using a video camera I documented the process. On each of the jobs which were done to the house, I placed a voice over which reads letters I have received ever since I lived at this address. Put together in this form the work becomes a self portrait by proxy. The work duration is 45 minutes, to be shown on a monitor as a continuous loop with no beginning or ending.’

Ruth Proctor Ruth Proctor’s work navigates a performative process, bringing into dialogue sculpture, installation, performance, video, 16mm film and works on paper. Simultaneously playing with a physical and conceptual connection to the use of material, gesture and form, Proctor’s current research and works have been examining notions of luck and failure positioned within the context of potentiality and chance. She often works in response to a particular space and time, staging performative moments within the gallery. She draws on autobiographical influences such as her own past as an ice skater and of contemporary dance as well as art historical concepts such as the flâneur and the derive.

Richard Healy Richard Healy’s works often take the form of prototypes or blueprints. Embodied through simulations of design, they frequently engage with the digital realm as a means for artistic production, and the acts of labour that are obscured beneath the computer’s programmed facade. An artist engaged with a search for new possibilities for the object, Healy displays an interest in the exhaustion of form, bringing together design pragmatics with conceptual play.

Sally Morfill The linear motions of spontaneous communicative gestures and notational drawing tracked using motion capture technology provide the starting point for Sally Morfill’s Position series. The drawings offer material translations of fleeting thoughts and actions, framing fragments of a recorded exchange between architects Pierre d’Avoine and Andrew Houlton. Discussing the incompleteness of architecture d’Avoine and Houlton respond to questions posed by Morfill around e.g. the idea of building as a fragment in relation to its site, or the relationship between the sketch and a developed (built or unbuilt) project. The drawings indicate a stage in an ongoing process of translating and re-working and reflect the open-ended and incomplete nature of the conversation.

Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers For ONE AND ONE AND ONE Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers will ask questions about deserts, desertions and occupations; posing these questions in the context of thinking around faculties of encounter and possible reformulations of belonging. A framing concern: where can effective action and politics appear? Their contribution to the exhibition will, like an emblem, have three parts, an epigram, an image, and a gloss. Louisa Minkin and Francis Summers have previously worked together on Preliminary notes for moving between desert and occupation, 2012, as a Five Years web-project. Both artists are committee members of the collectively organised artist-run gallery Five Years.

Yonatan Vinitsky Presents the work DEADENDEADENDEADENDEADENDEADENDEADEND (‘he was a good man!’) from 2011. Vinitsky’s practice is formed from a series of findings that he ‘translates’ into his own works. The finding can be a piece of paper that he found in the street, an art work by an unknown artist or a document from the archive. It is the process of decision-making of those who originally “made” what he found that motivates his work – the need to figure out how an artist works.

Mary Maclean’s work in photography develops her interest in a viewpoint and the space of cultural exchange. In a new body of work she explores a close up view of writing boards in lecture halls, collapsing their functional surface into the flat plane of the image. The abstract surface traces a written inscription and holds a literate history of information exchange. The written signage does not act as a repetition of the oral structure of knowledge transaction, but instead proposes both a material vestige and an anticipation of what is not there.

Tim Renshaw Tim Renshaw looks both at architecture through painting and for architecture in things that fall outside the domain of building. Rather than directly depict an existing space he identifies a basic underlying structure and through a process of recolouring and redesigning his paintings propose that in addition to function there are forms of spatiality that affect the texture of perception and give a different form of density to that experience.

Bernice Donszelmann Bernice Donszelmann’s installations and objects probe how material surfaces within architecture and domestic spaces produce empathic relationships with the human body. Everyday synthetic materials (plastics, foam, fabrics) are transformed into forms of ‘soft architecture’ – provisional modes of enclosure and gathering of space that echo and address the corporeality of the body.

Organized by Outside Architecture, the discussion forms part of the exhibition ONE AND ONE AND ONE at Cafe Gallery | Southwark Park | Bermondsey, which runs till October 28th.

Touring ONE AND ONE AND ONE tours to K3 Project Space, Zurich from 6 – 14 October Artists’ Talk: Sunday, 14 October 2012 from 16.00 – 17.00 Hrs. Tim Renshaw, Mary Maclean, Bernice Donszelmann, Katrine Hjelde, Monika Ursina Jager, Amikam Toren, Justin Hibbs.