STEVEN GRAINGER
’DISPLACEMENT ACTIVITIES’
2 JUNE – 25 JUNE, 2016
Displacement Activities, 2016, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a brown frame on a white wall, with two pieces of white paper framed inside of it. One with a blue and yellow abstract shape on the left, and the other with written black text. In the forefront, there are three hanging sculptures that look similar to the structure of ladders. With the one on the left being a cobalt blue, the middle a dark brown and the on the right a bright yellow.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
Steven Grainger's work addresses the nature of value, fear, personal responsibility and institutional culpability. In his first international solo exhibition, Grainger uses a legal document, historical and mythological symbols and his own body as the subject and material of his art.
Central to the exhibition is the latest in Grainger's series of Will-pieces that has been ongoing since 2011(whereby the legal document of a will-and-testament is developed as a form of artistic object and process). Each will bequeaths the artist's entire legal estate to a named beneficiary or group of beneficiaries. The wills are legally-binding only for a specified time (usually for the duration of the project or exhibition in which they are shown).
Displacement Activities, 2016, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: On the left, there are three hanging sculptures that look similar to the structure of ladders. With the one on the left being a cobalt blue, the middle a bright yellow and the on the right a dark brown. There is a brown frame on a white wall in the middle, with two pieces of white paper framed inside of it. One with a blue and yellow abstract shape on the left, and the other with written black text. On the right, there is a large pinkish red print of a persons forearm and hand making a finger gun.
During the exhibition at Verge, Sian McIntyre - the Director of the Gallery – has been named as Grainger's sole legal heir. A document allowing her to claim the artist's estate (in the event of his death) will be shown alongside a series of sculptures and a video exploring metaphors of artistic process, temporality and existential knowledge.
Alongside the will, the exhibition engages with a number of mythological symbols of the attempt to comprehend mortality. The Golden Apple (associated with the Greek myth of 'The Judgement of Paris', the Nordic figure of the Goddess of Youth, and the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden) is juxtaposed with the 'ticking time-bomb' of cartoons and the gesturing human figure of allegorical tradition.
Displacement Activities, 2016, detailed shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a bronzed ladder hung on a wall with a pyramid shaped light, projected by a lamp projector in front.
This legacy of symbols could be perceived as an equivalent form of cultural 'inheritance' to the economic legacy prescribed in a will. Grainger is particularly concerned with how these images might be utilised to explore the power relations that sustain artistic and cultural practice and the instability and changing social status of a queer subjectivity in the contemporary world.
The artist sees these factors as being related via the commodification of life (and death) – our social and legal tradition of 'inheritance'. The act of bequeathing his legacy to the commissioning curator of the exhibition is intended to give poetic expression to these ideas.
Displacement Activities, 2016, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a large scaled pinkish red print of a persons forearm and hand making a finger gun. This pointing at a person with short blonde hair and a black leather jacket sitting behind a white work desk.
The artist is concerned with how we negotiate value in a world where both creative and sexual identity are defined (and perhaps 'owned') by historic institutions and language. However this question, rather then being expressed solely in words, is conveyed via a sculptural and photographic language that is both protean and expansive - a method of capturing and recapturing space and air, gravity, form and light. The rebellious curiosity that led Eve to bite the fruit of knowledge thus becomes equivalent to the transformative (abstract) curiosity that drives artistic practice.
Displacement Activities, 2016, Installation shot. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a large scaled pinkish red print of a persons forearm and hand making a finger gun on the left. With a lamp projector in the back corner of the room, lighting a small portion of a white wall. On the right, there are small ladder like structures that have been suspended on various angles.