2nd Interim Exhibition: Re:Development

  • Artists: Garry Hunter and Ben Wilson (Chewing Gum Man)
  • Curated by: Graham Carrick at Fitzrovia Noir
  • HANMI GALLERY | LONDON
  • 20 July - 5 August 2011

Gallerist Heashin Kwak is establishing the Hanmi Gallery to complement her project space in Seoul, facilitating site responsive installations by alternating duos of Korean and British artists until the space is refurbished and opens in early 2012.

 

The burgeoning technological trend for immediacy has left a gap in the thought processes of image production, encouraging a dormant ‘laboratory of the mind’ that no longer complements innovative acts. This is deconstructed by distributing ‘found items from analogue days’ around the site, reflecting the separate departments of this former advertising agency, some of which are depleted, almost forgotten or changed beyond recognition.

 

‘Artwork’ now has little need for packs of magic markers. ‘Traffic’ once involved huge printed portfolios and mountains of mail being sent around a building, today it is virtually all electronic. ‘Planning’ is represented here in cabinets by the modus operandi of photographer Garry Hunter and his interventionist partner Chewing Gum Man. Both artists have used fire, Gum Man with his blowtorch on the gum and Hunter looking at the temperature that film starts to melt. This accompanies the inclusion of a typo from a digital rendering of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in the hand-finished publication accompanying the installation, that is a homage to the collaged magazine mock-up, the manually gathered spray-mounted mood-board, the specific concept of the marker pen ‘visual’. By slicing and mounting images in the tradition of fine art book ‘tip ins’ procedures are re-evaluated, even fetishised. This celebrates the lost ‘push and pull’ language offilm processing and is designed around the concept of a darkroom.