Play Grounds with Dani Abulhawa, Pierre Descamps and Jennifer West at GLOAM Gallery explores the intersections of skateboarding and space, architecture and play, within contemporary art.
Descamps’ photographs, whilst devoid of human presence, capture the interaction between skateboarders and city architecture by documenting the marks, and scars on the civic skin of our urban landscapes, whilst his posters memorialise his own sculptural interventions within the city. Designed to be skated, Descamps’ sculptures are often fleeting interjections on the urban topography, ephemeral interventions existing afterwards only through retrospective posters.
West also explores the gestural traces of skateboarding in her video work, Skate the Sky Film, in which skateboarders became painters in the Turbine Hall, using their wheels to paint with ink, melon juice and Ho-Ho’s directly onto the film which had recorded the LA sky. Just as Yves Klein defied gravity by “leaping into the void”, West’s video inverts natural physics by having skateboarders skating on the sky – catching air.
Finally, Abulhawa guides us, with her audio work, to re-navigate spaces; skateparks, skate spots. She invites us to consider how we use these spaces physically and socially, and how we can make them more inclusive. The work can be taken out into the city and listened to directly in the urban landscape, where the listener then becomes a performer of the city, following the narration and instructions for movement, to explore and reimagine the site.
Opening night
27 June, 6–9pm
Exhibition continues June 28 – July 20
Exhibition open Saturdays 12–4pm, other dates/times by appointment.
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