cu•rate is a group exhibition that explores contemporary curatorial practice through interdisciplinary collaborations between artist, curator and audience. Curating has become a current, cultural point of interest, and its growing visibility as a creative process is partly what this exhibition wishes to explore. The exhibition focuses on the role of the artist and the shared discussions which have led to new and re-imagined works. Finally, cu•rate invites its audience to become involved in an ongoing discourse that questions curating in the contemporary.
The exhibition discourse is presented through the works of four varied practitioners: Dave Charlesworth, Holly Hendry, Cesare Pietroiusti and James Thurgood. In Dave Charlesworth’s latest, unseen film Oculo (2014), he reappropriates archival footage which pieces together fragments of anonymous, personal histories. Cesare Pietroiusti also plays with ideas of the personal in a new commission of five hundred drawings. His work Untitled… (incomplete drawing) (2014), sets in motion a series of decisions tempting the audience to become the author.
James Thurgood questions human associations with beauty. His new work Out Of All The Love Before… (CMYK) (2014), employs the indivisible colours of cyan, magenta, yellow and black which make up the basic elements of all imagery. These colours reappear in his series Artist Quotes (2014), found in the centrefold of the catalogue. In an alternative approach to colour, Holly Hendry’s powder pink installation Cornered (2014), suggests both fragility and strength. Its opposing faces explore the unstable space between construction and collapse.
In this exhibition the negotiating role of inventor, coordinator and obsessor is embodied by artist, curator and audience. Ultimately, cu•rate is responding to the cultural conversations in exhibition making today.