A House Is Not A
Hotel
Lisa Slominski, Steven Morgana,
Christian Newby,
Theodoros Stamatogiannis, Farniyaz Zaker
25 July – 10
September 2014
Opening: Thursday, 24
July 2014, 18:30-21:00
press release
A House Is Not A
Hotel, 25 July – 10 September,
is a curated group
exhibition of emerging UK-based artists.
Itinerancy has
increasingly become one of the primary characteristics that differentiate the
lifestyles
of the people,
particularly the young, of contemporary western societies from the lifestyles
of their
predecessors. We move from city to city, rented accommodation to rented
accommodation
at an ever-increasing
pace. A consequence of employment becoming increasingly flexible
and precarious as
well as a workforce that is more skilled and less laden with material and
maternal/paternal
commitments than its precursors. It is a process that is also hastened
by a housing market
in which supply and demand have slowly drifted apart from each other.
This situation is
nowhere more evident than in London, a city in which the migratory flow around
and through it happens
at an exhilarating pace and where the ideologically driven discourse
on how to manage the
places we live in is at its most charged.
For those that can
take advantage of it, this freedom of movement opens up exciting and liberating
opportunities while
for others it ebbs at the sense of security that stability and continuity can
bring.
Nevertheless, for
both of these groups, their relationship with the places in which they live is
rapidly
changing, and is
increasingly one that is defined by transience.
The six artists
included in A House Is Not A Hotel each make work that is motivated by a
distinctly
different set of
concerns and subject matter. Lisa Slominski plays with the palette and motifs,
as well
as the patterning and
repletion, of interior design. Christian Newby deploys an abstract painting
practice and its
high-art connotations within the context of craft objects such as ceramics and
carpets.
Fazyzer Zaker
juxtaposes references to architecture and female clothing, drawing out their
analogous
roles in mediating
between the public and the private.
Theodoros Stamatogiannis replicates
ubiquitous
architectural components such as floors, doors, and windows, in a way that
perturbs their
traditional function
and consequently renegotiates our relationship with them. Steven Morgana
acquires a
heterogeneous array of materials from the public domain such as charity
posters, detritus
from abandoned
buildings, and crowd control barriers, which are transformed into structures
that are
alluring and pristine
while still hinting at the more complex and forlorn reality that the original
objects
are props in. Yet, within their respective practices, each
artist has created work that deals with the
house/home/dwelling
place and the tropes of the distinctly contemporary relationship we have with
it,
creating a curatorial
point of cohesion with the exhibition that has been arrived at from a set of
distinctly different
directions.
A House Is Not A
Hotel demonstrates the commitment Pi Artworks, London has to not only
exhibiting
work of its own
international artists but also creating an platform for emerging UK based
practitioners,
something that will
continue beyond the gallery’s first year in London.
Pi ARTWORKS London
55 Eastcastle Street
London W1W 8EG
Tel:+44 207 637 8403
Pi ARTWORKS Istanbul
İstiklal Cad. Mısır
Apt 163/4 Galatasaray
Tel: +90 212 293 71
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