Yuhong had the exterior facade "infront" of the gallery as well as the studios and kitchen "behind"; Matt had two Instaprojectors with tape fed through ceiling hooks in the sound studio through the door "next" to the gallery; Shirine used the studio monitor and installed their own CRT monitor in the main space; and I had my works on the glass of the main doors and the peephole of the security door - the galleries pourous spaces and lookouts. And we were all in the zine too.
Poems for Catching A Glimpse of
6 pages, inkjet print on recycled 80 gsm paper, A5, self-published edition of 50 + 1 artists proof, 2023
Featuring myself, Shirine Shah, Matt Feldman, and Yuhong Wang
Printed as a companion to the exhibition, this was available to pick up for free in the gallery space.
I think of this as a mini-exhibition in print existing alongside the main exhibition, which visitors can take home as a way of marking the exhibition.
I wanted to use Poems for A Gap In the Door to host my own work alongside the other's, and I liked the idea of using my work to frame and complement the show and the gallery:
Poem for the Sky, Read By the Sun, 2023
Posca pen drawing on glass fronted door (kept closed). I copied the word as it appeared in a photo I took of the word "Opens" in blue felt tip written on a window on the site of Carer's Common Room Brixton (now sadly defunct)
I liked the anomaly of the original "Opens" mark - presumably to indicate a window that opens - the way it hovered over the skyline on the 5th floor.
I liked appropriating it so it floats over the gallery space, neither and both inside and/nor outside. And how the sun casts its shadow slowly across the space over the course of the day, "reading" the poem and completing the work.
Poem for Spencer Place
Blue acetate sheet over security door peephole in Conditions Studio Project Space, 2023
I'm really proud of this work, a simple intervention. You look through a peephole and reality is already distorted by the fisheye lens. You look out to surveil outside, who's there. Who's there can't look in.
Adding a blue sheet incentivises people to go and look through it, seeing outside further distorted in blue; to be seen as magical and new for its own sake.
You look through the peephole and this is what you see - the courtyard outside but blue. The photo documentation turned out quite magical, and I decided to video record it on my phone. I liked the recording so much I decided to turn it into 10 minute artist's film - the cameras autofocus blurring and refocusing on a spec of dirt on the lens and then refocussing again on the courtyard. I'll detail the film in my next post.
Poem In Blue, 2023
The resulting film from documentation of Poem for Spencer Place. Originally an unbroken 10 min shot through the peephole.
For its screening at Conditions Exhibition 2022-23 I broke it into four excerpts of 30 secs to 1 min each, to be played as part of a looping reel in the basement cinema space with 3 other artist's films. Each excerpt was to be played in between each film, creating abstract interludes of a fragmented (non) narrative in the running order.
A 1 min excerpt of the film was submitted to Silent Video Edition for Musicians, a film reel for the Video Edition Pavillion curated by Ebba Jahn for The Wrong Biennale no. 6 from November 2023 to March 2024, and Video Edition Embassy screened in London, 2024. It has since been screened twice in Germany, with a third screening upcoming in September.
The booklet housed one image by each artist in the show. Each image a discreet artwork in print, relating to a corresponding work in the show.
Mine was Poem In Blue (View Through 89 Gloucester Rd. Rear Security Door), a photo taken through the peephole to document Poem for Spencer Place.
It has since been published in A Collective Inquiry into Social Evisceration or sexy thinky thinky time #2: BLUE (2023) by The Ellegists Collective
https://www.theelegists.com/shop-1/p/zine-vol-2-blue-pre-order
Retitled Poem In Blue (View through Conditions Studios rear security door, Croydon), I turned the image into an edition of 50 A4 prints on the same recycled paper the booklet is printed on.
I thought of launching the edition after all copies of the booklet had been given away, but I still have 10 or so left over.
The edition is now donated to the Artists Supporting Palestine initiative, available via their online catalogue. All funds raised go to MAP
https://www.artistssupportingpalestine.org/catalogue/catalogue-l-r#h.o244niu1gqzq
Josh "Josh Philpott" Philpott
