Casablanca Moon is a new commission by London-based artist Alec Kronacker which takes its title from a song by the 1970s band Slapp Happy. A group of three painted wooden figures and a wall painting are positioned in the Project Space’s small square windows and the wall painting frames its largest wall. Each of the pieces utilises different architectural features of the Project Space in unique and novel ways.
The figures, each placed in front of a painted backdrop, make up a band and are loosely related to the different members of Slapp Happy (Peter Blegvad, Dagmar Krause and Anthony Moore). The wall painting, Hoboken to Casablanca, represents a false architectural structure made up of an arrangement of interlocking images bordering the Project Space’s doorways. These images relate to the story of an undercover agent operating in different environments and growing increasingly paranoid as the action shifts from West to East along the length of the wall. The story is presented as an abstract narrative in a tasteful decorative pattern, the painting alluding to a feeling of place rather than specific events. However, the individual motifs suggest something stranger and unsettling. The imagery is closely related to the content of a song Casablanca Moon.
Project Space provides exhibition and development opportunities to emerging artists offering a small grant to develop new experimental work for exhibition in the unique environment of Café 171 at Jerwood Space, adjacent to the galleries. Since 2004 it has presented new work from artists including Luke McCreadie, Alice May Williams, Paul Schneider, Rhys Coren, Anna Bunting-Branch, Emma Charles, Meg Mosley, Sara Nunes Fernandes, Johann Arens, Matthew Johnstone, Katie Schwab and Jamie George, Ben Senior, Ralph Dorey, Mindy Lee, Patrick Coyle, Gemma Anderson, Annabel Tilley, Alice Browne, and Holly Antrum.
