24 July – 16 August 2008
Private View: Wednesday 23 July 18:00 – 20:00
Location: 29 Thurloe Place, London SW7
Opening times: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 18:00
Handel Street Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by John Plowman. The objects that Plowman has been making recently are the outcomes of performances in which the private act of reading is made public, as the book is read the pages are torn and re-stacked within a plywood structure. Using his own library as his source material Plowman has read a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica to produce ‘mis-un-pedia’ and ‘mis-un-library
From left: ‘Mis-un-pedia’, 2008; ‘English Idioms’, 2008, John Plowman
More recently Plowman has been scanning the bookshelves of High Street bookstores and purchasing books to read. ‘Queens English’ is a work in which multiple copies of an English Dictionary have been read and re-stacked on to book shelves. Recently acquired books to be read specifically for this exhibition include a hefty tome entitled ‘30,000 years of Art’ together with a series of dictionaries whose topics include sociology, philosophy and architecture.
For the duration of the exhibition Plowman will be establishing the Thurloe Place Reading Group in which the focus will be on the relationship between artist, audience, and gallery, analogous to that between author, reader and library. Membership of the Reading Group will be open to all and each week will focus on a particular book and members of the group will engage in a collaborative and performative action. Resulting in an accumulative piece of work that will develop over the course of the exhibition
‘Queens English’, 2008; performance during Reading Room exhibition, John Plowman, 2008
John Plowman has exhibited in numerous one person and group exhibitions in this country and abroad most recently earlier this year in ‘Catching the Word’ at the Black and White Gallery, New York. In recent years his interest has been in the temporal aspect of art production in which investigations into the possibility of the site of exhibition also being the site of production have been fore fronted. With a particular focus on the question of who bears witness to this activity of production, artist, audience or both. It is his interest in the role of the audience that has informed the development of his curatorial project Beacon which was established in 2004.
The Thurloe Place Reading Group will meet at 3 pm every Saturday during the course of the exhibition.
For further information please contact:
Clare Munro 07815 754634 / info@handelsteetprojects.com / www.handelstreetprojects.com
Handel Street Projects would like to thank:
Brompton Estates and the Brompton design project; supporting the partnership between the creative and business sectors.