The Final Project, 1991–92, Jo Spence. Courtesy the Estate of Jo Spence and Richard Saltoun Gallery © The Estate of Jo SpenceThe dominant force driving Elizabeth Price's first-time curation effort is the concept of the line, specifically, the horizontal one. This concept runs like a clothesline throughout the artist’s vision of stages of human behavior and movement and subtlety supports and hangs above each of the pieces in the poetically-titled IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY exhibit. Consisting of both static installations, videos, and black-and-white photography, the rousing group show takes an extra bit of time playing with the image of man or woman lying down, sometimes fixed in a prostrate position.In total, the curated show includes over 60 artists, including Constantin Brancusi, Edward Onslow Ford, Henry Fuseli, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman. The ability to bring together such high-caliber creative minds was a dream come true for Price, who was the winner of the Turner Prize in 2012.The exhibit shines in its transitional journey, following four major human life movements: sleeping, working, mourning, and dancing. While "Sleeping" and "Working" seem to meld into one another, the majority of the exhibit art flows along the linear theme, with one meticulous piece connected to the next according to Prince's directional leanings.Conduit art pieces connect different artworks, from the stages of sleeping to working, while keeping the horizontal imagery consistent. Within both are perceived understandings of perspective: there is a photograph of a perfectly stacked pile of papers, an image that may look familiar to so many office jobs, placed along a collage of images displaying eerily geometric glaciers and place-marker signs from the cubicle-free Arctic.Price herself works in the mediums of video and installation art. While curating IN A DREAM YOU SAW… the artist used the opportunity to meditate on the purpose of an art exhibit and to play with the spatial potential of the gallery:“The opportunity to create an exhibition of other artists’ work is one that comes rarely to artists themselves. I have approached it with an artist’s methods, but also as a (solitary) viewer of art exhibitions over many years. For me exhibitions are a place for inventing: for encountering objects, images and events, in all their sensual and material complexity and imagining things about them why they were made, and what could they mean. In creating this exhibition I have reflected upon some genealogies of art’s forms, as well as the social histories that have generated them, but above all, I have sought to explore the license that art gives us to make our own sense of it.”After "Working" is “Mourning,” which features a grand plastic sepulcher statue, Effigy of Eleanor Aquitaine. It is joined by several photographs of mourners.“Dancing” the last section of the exhibit, closing out the show on a slightly brighter note—if not still filled with the artist’s own metaphorical concepts, with displays of rotation, movement, and a little life. Follow the rest of the line through IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY in the images below:The exhibit IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY is part of the Hayward Touring collections and currently shows at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth galleries until October 30, 2016. See more information on the exhibit here.Related:American Car Culture Gets a Roaring Group ShowSay Oi! to 40 Years of Punk Photos in LondonTonight: A Group Show for ‘Amateurs Only’
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