Raconteur

Bobby Lloyd &
Katy Beinart, artist-in-residence

 

14 Mar - 21 Apr, 2012

 

 

please scroll right for press release & some images in situ
<click here to download PR as pdf>

 

Raconteur with Katy Beinart & Bobby Lloyd

 
Raconteur is an exhibition exploring memory.  The push and pull of trying to keep all sentiments and stories of ourselves intact, while at the same time not living in the past; the fragile hold on some memories and the heavy grip of others.  Bobby Lloyd’s and Katy Beinart’s works are like questions on how we deal with this.

 

Bobby Lloyd "Trip to the Painted Desert 1" at AUGUST art

(left): "Trip to the Painted Desert 1", Bobby Lloyd, found object, wood, bolts

(right): "Imagined Landscape 2", Bobby Lloyd, image on transparency, lightbox

(far right): image, unlit from "Imagined Landscape 2"

Bobby Lloyd "Imagined Landscape 2" at AUGUST art Bobby Lloyd "Imagined Landscape 2" at AUGUST art

Bobby Lloyd works with found objects.  Particularly for the works in the exhibition, objects left behind in burnt out and demolition sites: fragments of books, pots still with patina from being held.  The fragility of these abandoned objects is moving.  Yet in seeing one pot after another, they also become ordinary, banal.  They may make us think, there have been these pots, and there will be others to come.

There is also the relationship between the objects and their vitrines.  We usually pay little mind to display units as it's the contents we want to focus on.  Here, they quietly draw attention to the act of preservation.  We can see some of the containers allowing the contained ample room to breathe while others enclose their objects claustrophobically.  Some provide sturdy protection whilst others are even more fragile than the objects.  The containers can be read as metaphors for our need to hold on dearly, and also questions whether we can?

Katy Beinart’s work looks at migration, memory of place, and our sense of belonging.  Her practice often transposes one work into another, following the process of how we tell and re-tell stories of ourselves.  In an earlier work, the artist (in collaboration with artist Rebecca Beinart) offered memory collection and archiving services to residents of Brixton, an area of London rich in migrant history.  The stories are re-used in another work, one that made them physical via an “aurophone” that abstracted the words as holes punched onto 35 mm film strips.  The strips were then played through a music box, re-making the “stories” ethereal and indistinguishable.

For this exhibition, Beinart will use the film strips as templates in a woven lace work, once more transforming the works and stories anew.  She will be artist-in-residence in the gallery, and whilst she weaves, she will be inviting viewers and passersby to offer their memories and stories of place, whether of the gallery's neighbourhood, Shoreditch - a cross roads of old East London traders, the advancing financial district, trendy bars and start-up dotcom businesses - or of elsewhere.  Beinart's work may make us wonder: how are memories constructed?  How do they transfer between us?

katy & rebecca beinart's aurophone

 

 

 

(left): "aurophone", Katy Beinart & Rebecca Beinart

(right): Katy Beinart in residence, making "Pattern Language"

(far right): detail of "Pattern Language", work in progress

Katy Beinart in residence at AUGUST art Katy Beinart, detail of "Pattern Language" at AUGUST art Raconteur is an exhibition asking whether memory is about collecting or interpreting?  Archiving or fictionalizing?  Or perhaps, an acknowledgement that it is all just forms of storytelling.

Download press release as a .pdf document: Press Release