Un-ion On-ion In-ion is a new installation of sculptural and photographic works by Keira Greene. These have been produced by the artist while developing her ongoing research into the retreat as a space for enacting experimental models of communal living and for facilitating independent internal reflection. This body of work contributes towards a new moving image work, which was filmed at Anna Halprin’s Mountain Home Studio, San Francisco, and will be screened as part of an expanded event that forms part of the upcoming Jerwood Staging Series.
The exhibition features two new photographic works, Esalen Pool and Asha Centre, which form part of Greene’s ongoing series, High Beams. These images conjure the removed and enclosed quality of retreat centres through a focus on the architecture’s intervention into the obscure rural landscape. Such an emphasis brings to the forefront their spatial qualities into which individuals might withdraw in order to reflect on the various subjective journeys that originally brought them there. A neon sculpture, Wave, nods to the shared representation of new-age aesthetics on-going in the urban industries of sex, food and fashion.
The final work in the series, a newly commissioned sundial, anchors the exhibition in a conversation with time. In addition to thinking about the time that we take, or don’t take, for ourselves, Greene is also interested in considering the activities of these institutions in relation to the context of their original establishment; within a period of changing social attitudes which resulted in the proliferation of counter-cultural ideals in the 1960s. In considering the act of retreat now, Greene positions herself as simultaneously immersed subject and objective spectator in the day-to-day running of these experimental institutions in order to understand their overarching ethos. In particular she is interested in the conflation of the social and the environmental and how these aspects come together as pedagogic space.
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, Alec Kronacker, 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.