A group exhibition of newly-commissioned works by Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth, The Hut Project, and Charlie Woolley. Each of the contributors works collaboratively and are influenced by the current digital landscape, curated by Sarah Williams.
In recent years a surge in the use of digital communication technology has impacted on artistic practice in the way work is produced, discussed and displayed. As a result there has been an increase in performance-based work, events, film, installation, broadcast and online exploration. Assembly aims to explore the influence of the constantly-shifting platform of the Internet and how work made in an increasingly digitalised world is reconciled within the context of a physical gallery space.
Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth’s videos, events and installations use technologies that augment ways of seeing to create works that reveal how these technologies relate to the performativity of people, places and objects. For Assembly, the artists show an exploded installation of their blog, an online record of separate journeys shown as a continuous chain of overlapping and mirrored events.
The Hut Project is an artist collective interested in how objects might perform as containers of their own process. Their discursive practice constructs long sequences of translations between action, image, and object, resulting in artworks that act like stages for, or between, events. For Assembly, The Hut Project have created a new dance work for video, derived from a segment of documentation of a previous performance resulting in a large-scale production by a choreographer and dance company at a Jerwood Space rehearsal room then shown in the exhibition in the mediated form of a single-channel video installation.
Charlie Woolley brings together images, objects and collaborators within his practice, producing works that respond to a variety of subject matter from the flickering screens of television sets and found material from the Internet to exploration into the veracity of protest aesthetics. His epic Radio Show, an ongoing collaborative broadcast platform, has been presented in several galleries and has involved many participants. For Assembly, Woolley has created an installation containing drapes and furniture which formed the context of a space for activity. Over the course of the exhibition he collaborates with individuals and organisations and invites participants to take part in a series of events housed within his installation. The work became activated by interaction, conversation and the gathering of bodies in the space.
An online catalogue accompanied the exhibition with text by James Smith, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of thisistomorrow.info. A series of events organised by Charlie Woolley and Richard John Jones also took place, supported by Arts Council England.
Jerwood Encounters are one-off curated exhibitions which provide artists and curators with new exhibition opportunities and the chance to explore issues and territories in the borderlands between the main disciplinary fields of the Jerwood Visual Arts programme. They were first established in 2009.
