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Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan
Does your contemplation of the situation
fuck with the flow of circulation
4 July to 6 September 2009
Eastside Projects proudly presents a solo show by Glasgow based artists Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan. The collaborative duo have made a new work which through its very naming, Does your contemplation of the situation fuck with the flow of circulation, clearly, eloquently and aggressively, introduces the duo’s playful, provocative and interrogative art practice. Since 1995 Tatham and O’Sullivan have created work concerned with the mythic potential of art, and how art can exist as an event in a particular space and time. Situated between, and utilising, sculpture, painting, architecture, photography, performance, literature, institutional critique and curation, the artists’ works use carefully crafted paths, displacements and diversions as strategies for synthesising the concept of culture as a localised system of meanings and the world of art - seen as a community sharing a collective mysticism of forms, objects and histories.
Does your contemplation… is a complex re-presenting of the artists’ tropes as new construct, tackling the fact that the artists’ most significant works exist in the form of an exhibition. While an exhibition may be comprised of a number of ‘pieces’, it is the choreography or curation of these pieces that needs to be read as the work-construct. Eastside Projects’ very particular state of reflexive performativity as a venue, and context within which to make a new work, provides the artists with an opportunity to test out new strategies as a public process of re-analysis.
Tatham and O’Sullivan consider Eastside Projects a non-standard gallery and are treating it as a found site, working “on top of” the venue with components that form the exhibition as a series of objects (or constructed artefacts) designed to challenge the function and status of the venue and its contents.
The objects consist of a new architectural construction, a large patterned Z-shaped tunnel which can be entered and passed through, positioned centrally amongst elements that adapt and reclaim the artists’ existing tropes with a new development in the form of a digital projection sequencing colour manipulated photographs interwoven with an innate rhetorical question.
Posters on the main painted wall pronounce ‘Ecstacy Kills’ which, whilst perhaps exploring the benevolence of the work that an artist can do, also reclaims a found design item with a perceived lineage to an older work by the artists, HK 2001, that utilised the words ‘Heroin Kills’ in a number of sculptural formats.
With invitation card, poster and publication the artists combine original and found material. The cartoon image is made up of two found elements collaged together and digitally processed to appear congruous. Forming a culmination point out of an organic system of elements Tatham and O’Sullivan are treating each part of the gallery structure as a fertile platform for the production of work – the work that art needs to do.
Throughout Does your contemplation… the artists are opening up the language that they use in order to better fashion an exhibition to make the viewer aware of their own thinking processes - an environment to highlight consciousness!
Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan (b. 1971, W. Yorks & 1967, Norwich. Live and work in Glasgow.) Recent solo exhibitions include You can take is as a thing or you can take it as a thing, La Salle de Bains, Lyon 2009; Areyoufeelingourmeaning? Galerie FrancescaPia, Zurich, 2008; A fee to avoid our expenses, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, 2007; The This & The That of a Category Error, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, 2007; Oh We Will, We Will, Will We, Studio Voltaire, London 2005; and Think Thingamajig and Other Things, Kunsthaus Glasus, Switzerland, 2003.
Exhibition kindly supported by The Elephant Trust.
• A new Artists Edition is available by the artists produced to coincide with the exhibition – two A2 silk-screen prints (diptych) in an edition of 20, priced at £150 unframed.
• Click here to download a PDF of an interview between Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan and Gavin Wade featured in the publication accompanying the exhibition.
• The exhibition 'newspaper' is available to buy online
