During the last days of Guns and Roses we had a visit by two very
animated-Canadians, Kate Grieve and Dallas Seitz. They were starting a Project
Space in Bethnal Green and wanted us to curate a show after having seen
Guns and Roses.
Opportunities like this do not fall into your hands every day and they tend
to fade away without a prompt response. So we started working on an idea
for a show the following day.
The idea of TRAILER being a nomadic gallery was starting to develop. But
we had never set out to establish an artists collective or to represent
artists. TRAILER was an opportunity for artists to exhibit their work and
participate within a critical debate. Because of this, the shows so far
had been staged in a theatrical manner to act as ‘showcase’
of current contemporary art practice by London based artists, but we felt
that our approach this time had to be more focused.
1 000 000mph Project Space itself once used to be a betting shop, now transformed
with a simple neo minimalist layout. From the outside the space still retains
aspects of the former betting shop but on the inside it could quite easily
be a designer furniture shop like the ones that now appear overnight in
Columbia Road and Brick Lane. Rather than disguising this fact we decided
to use this sense of ambiguity to choose and set the work in a way that
echoed this ambivalence.
In order to convey this idea of how ‘first impressions’ are
formed, much of the work had a strong emphasis on the way that ‘surfaces’
carry meaning and reveal as well as conceal information. We also managed
to borrow some lights from Habitat to give the space a softer atmosphere
which would complement the general aesthetic of the show. In the 1 000 000mph
Project Space you absorbed most of the experience as soon as you walked
in.
We were very grateful for the freedom and opportunity provided by Kate and Dallas to invite us to do this show. We had met some new artists and TRAILER was beginning to feel like a ‘snowball’, with artists from previous shows in the centre and newer artists being gathered in its path.