Line Ellegaard
Tom Fleming
Edwin Pennicott
Julia Prezewosky
Kym Ward
James Whittingham
June 28th to July 26th 2008
July 11th 2008 from 7.30pm: Performances by Line Ellegaard and Kym Ward
Pitrowski was pleased to host an exhibition of emerging artists, who previously studied at Chelsea College of Art, London. Graduating within three years of each other, at the time of the show, the artists’ were all around 26 years old.
The work of the selected artists dealt with the idea of how we perceive different kinds of space, from the inside of a tomato ketchup bottle, to the gallery itself. The title of the show was taken from a collection of short texts by the French writer George Perec; in these texts he rigorously examines, in a light hearted way, the notion of types of spaces, especially everyday space.
Tom Fleming & Edwin Pennicott, IN-OUT (detail), sculpture & video installation, © 2007
Species of spaces was, however, an exhibition with a second, slightly more dubious meta level. The show pretended to give us views of the ordinary that become comical or curious through the act of concentrated looking: James Whittingham’s images of formulaic living rooms increasingly distance themselves from our conception of a useable, homely space, the more we focus on finding patterns in their organisation. Household items which pose as ergonomic are re-imagined in minature as a flattened arrangement of shape and depth.
In her performance and installation, Kym Ward, in her assumed role as the curator of the show, quite literally monitored the other artists work on CCTV cameras. The intention was in turns absurd and questionably controlling; a commentary on the act of curation itself, hosting the art work, but also unable to exist without it.
This dominance was however undermined by Julia Prezewowsky’s installation ‘Up Yours’, which used an intimate image of the curator in order to tantalize viewers. Playing with the themes of voyerism and surveillance, viewers who spied on the curator were themselves spied on.
Blurring the line between collaboration and control, viewer and the viewed, Species of Spaces tried to deceptively direct the act of looking.
Curated by: Kym Ward
Brunnenstraße 5, 10119 Berlin http://www.pitrowski-berlin.de/