Jyll
Bradley & Stuart Brisley
8 March - 10 April, 2013 |
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Andrew Mummery is pleased to announce the first of a series
of ongoing dialogues which will form the central theme of the
exhibition programme at Mummery + Schnelle’s new gallery
space.
Jyll Bradley and Stuart Brisley have been invited to exhibit
groups of works that employ photography as a means to explore
notions of identity, community and the politics of place. Common
to both artists’ work is the use of photography as a structural
and environmental experience, rather than as documentation.
Jyll Bradley will be exhibiting light boxes and what she calls
light drawings, which she makes using a combination of photography
and photocopying. The works relate to her first experiences
of London when she was a student at Goldsmiths College in the
late 1980s, in particular travelling on the London Underground
- a flâneur - and being drawn to the light boxes in the
passages between the platforms. Bradley pioneered the use of
commercial light boxes in British art, reflecting on their nature
as beacons, navigation points and sales pitches. Important to
Bradley’s work are the aesthetics of minimalism –
especially the reflection of light as volume – but, distinctively,
she uses them to insist on a content that is relational to sexual
politics and identity. She is interested in the collective construction
of identity and social relations and how these are now often
mediated through reified objects of consumption. Bradley’s
work, however, asserts identity as flux, not as something fixed.
Flux is also a concern of the gallery, reflective as it must
be of changes in object status, institutional frameworks and
forms of distribution. |
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Stuart Brisley’s work, like that of Jyll Bradley, moves
between art contexts and social ones. It is addressed to the
politics of consumption, class relations and authority. Brisley
is best known as a key figure in British performance art, but
what deserves to be better recognized is the importance of painting,
sculpture, video, photography and drawing to his practice, and
how his work in these media contribute to a more wide ranging
debate about what performance means. At Mummery + Schnelle in
March Brisley will be exhibiting seven photographs taken between
1989 and 1991 in and around Brick Lane in East London, and in
Berlin. These have been selected from a much larger body of
work that followed on from the important Georgiana Collection
series. This began as an attempt to address the question “What
is Community” and the photographs exhibited here continue
to investigate this. They depict places and things in states
of transition, spaces of display and exchange, and objects symbolic
of displacement.
Notes on the Artists
Jyll Bradley
Jyll Bradley’s wide ranging artistic practice has encompassed
photo-based studio work such as light boxes and her unique
‘light drawings’, public art projects in which
she has worked closely with local communities, and the writing
of plays for radio. In all her work she makes the political
personal, but always with a poetic sensibility to place and
individual identity. Bradley’s studio work has been
inspired by aspects of minimalism and feminism. She makes
beautiful, enigmatic objects often containing parallel narratives
whose meaning is never fully fixed. Light is an important
protagonist in her work and she talks of using it to “bring
things into the present”. Her public projects have involved
a collaborative search for meaning in “place”.
www.jyllbradley.net
Stuart Brisley
Stuart Brisley has been an important figure in British art
for sixty years. He is probably best known for the series
of key performance related works created in the 1970s and
80s that re-defined what “performance art” might
be and encompass. Brisley used his body as a metaphorical
and allegorical site to enact and comment upon how the individual
situates him/herself between authority and freedom. What is
often forgotten, however, is how long Brisley has been creating
innovative work and the importance to his practice, alongside
performance, of painting, photography, sculpture, video and
drawing. His is a combative art involving the politicization
of the body, and is imbued with a deep understanding of how
rituals function in society and how they can be used to produce
insights into the way society operates. Today, at a time of
increasing political, social and economic polarization, Stuart
Brisley’s critique of societal norms and prejudices
is as relevant and compelling as it ever was.
www.stuartbrisley.com
Mummery + Schnelle will be pleased to present in October 2013,
in collaboration with Domobaal, two exhibitions of new work
by Brisley.
For further information, please contact Mummery + Schnelle
on:
+44 (0)20 7729 9707 or at: info@mummeryschnelle.com
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