- Venue
- Pi Artworks
- Starts
- Friday, July 25, 2014
- Ends
- Wednesday, September 10, 2014
- Address
- 55 Eastcastle Street London W1W 8EG
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Pi Artworks, London
A House Is Not A Hotel
Steven Morgana, Christian Newby, Lisa Slominski, Theodoros Stamatogiannis, Farniyaz Zaker
Opening: 24 July, 18:30-21:00
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 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.
For press information and images, please contact: Neil Jefferies ([email protected]) or call +44 207 637 8403
