Simon Starling
Ephemera is the title of the current exhibition at Green On Red Gallery curated by the Director Jerome O Drisceoil. The exhibition focuses on work whose claim on space, materials, even objecthood itself is slight and modest in the extreme. These works dare the viewer to accept their validity and viability as artworks. In the original brief for the exhibition, in fact, the curator specifically sought work :
"that is anti-heroic or anti-monumental in nature; work that deflates expectations. It prefers, instead, a process or materials that are drawn from the everyday and that, in themselves might ordinarily be considered worthless or inconsequential. In their modesty or new use they can present a critique of established systems or conventions forcing a renegotiation of the terms of artistic, economic or social exchange."
Coming close to a prank, Jonathan Monk issues an instruction to the Gallery as the artwork or is the artwork the labour of father and son builders who actually construct the work in the gallery ? Gabriel Kuri’s assemblages use unrelated objects that perform a fine, minimal balancing act. Heavy slabs of stone pinch empty cans and till receipts with their crushing weight echoing a state of economic affairs/squeeze elsewhere. Attention is drawn to simple daily occurrences and mundane shopping transactions that point to the trail of ( financial ) information that accompanies almost everything we do. Kuri is currently exhibiting in the Berlin Biennale. Ian Kiaer uses painting/imagery in a tentative, incomplete way combined with objects and small architectural models usually placed on the floor or small table that remain, at best, fragmentary but intentionally open-ended. A similar poetry attaches to the use and reuse of materials and objects in the work of Simon Starling, now perhaps best know for his Turner-prize winning Boat-Shed-Boat.
New work for the exhibition includes Breughel Project : Yellow/Ledoux Monument by Ian Kiaer ( Alison Jacques Gallery, London ), Upside Down Horizontal Line and Ejercicio 2005-2006 II by Gabriel Kuri ( Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico ), Father and Son Dry Stone Wall by Jonathan Monk ( Lisson Gallery, London and Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris). Simon Starling’s Home-made Three-Legged Stool is courtesy of Modern Institute Gallery, Glasgow.