Group Show
Point – Horizon – Structure: Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, and Terry Smith.
15.03.12 - 28.04.12
Mummery + Schnelle / London / England
Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to present a show with recent works by Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, and Terry Smith.
The title of the exhibition, Point-Horizon-Structure comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s study of perception, defining it as a process of experience and conscious action. The three artists featured in this show share a similar concern for the mechanisms of perception, questioning and constantly redefining its essence through experimental studio practices. The works included in this show share a common ground, a fundamental set of elements with which to experience and understand the phenomenology of perception, namely light and shadow, and correspondently, matter and void. These elements represent the binary opposition at the heart of an experience of the world, which is predominantly visual and photographic. Through their studio practice, these artists question the intersections of photography, drawing and installation, blurring the line between the bi-dimensional and the sculptural.
Jyll Bradley presents a selection of works from three of her most recent series: ‘Their flight is knowledge, space is their alienation’, ‘Look at me now and here I am’ and ‘Airports for the Lights, Shadows and Particles’. Light is a protagonist in Bradley’s work, drawing together images, words and form to create inquiring spaces and unusual meetings. Her “light drawings” meditate on studio practice and form a personal art history relating to photography and its history. Her light boxes and aluminium panels draw on industrial, Minimalist forms and use them to insist on content vis a vis sexual politics and identity. For Bradley a light box is a beacon, a navigation point and a sales pitch. Using them, as she does in two of the works in this exhibition, to depict women priests performing acts of obeisance in ornate church interiors raises questions about power, identity and the nature of religious faith.
Jyll Bradley (b.Folkestone 1966) was educated at Goldsmith’s College (1985–88) and the Slade (1991–3). Since the early 1990s she has exhibited her work in numerous notable exhibitions both in the UK and internationally including The British Art Show, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (1990), Maureen Paley Interim Art (1989), the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2008) and the inaugural show at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London (2009). Bradley has also undertaken major commissions for the re-opening of Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2005), and solo British Council funded projects with Museo De Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China (both 2004). In 2008 her Residency within Liverpool Botanical Collection formed one of the significant commissions for the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. Bradley’s work was recently the subject of a major survey show Airports for the Lights, Shadows and Particles first shown at The Exchange (Newlyn Art Gallery) in 2010 and touring to the Bluecoat, Liverpool 2011. She is currently working on a major project for Canberra’s Centenary programme in 2013.
To fold is an action that allows Paul Caffell to manipulate light and shadow. His practice entails both a construction, by means of scoring and folding, and a deconstruction, from unfolding and flattening. The works from his two series ‘Expansions’ and ‘Envelopes’ experiment with the perception of structure and volume, employing a very rigorous monochromatic scale and an essential photographic process – the platinum print.
Paul Caffell has been making art since the early 1960s, when as an emerging young artist he was mentored by the leading British modernist critic, collector and painter, Roland Penrose. After exhibiting internationally during the decade, with work being purchased by several important collections, he withdrew to paint privately and developed his photographic practice. Mummery + Schnelle first showed Caffell’s work in the group show ‘To Become Like Music’ in 2008, emphasising the influences and affinities of the paintings in the relationship between music and modernist painting and performance in the post-war avant-garde. He had his first solo exhibition at the gallery at the end of 2011. A book documenting his paintings and platinum prints from 1961 to 2011 is available from the gallery.
Terry Smith’s practice has often involved direct action with the space around him and the objects that fill it, open and close it, contain or expand it. Smith’s work is a constant inquiry into the perception of space and the poetry of the everyday. His practice involves multiple processes and actions, from a physical intervention of space by means of construction and demolition, through to a sculptural notion of drawing where the surface of the paper becomes three-dimensional through relief and indentation, but whose method involves as least as much erasure as addition. Smith’s work in this exhibition will be in photography, drawing and film.
In 1994 Terry Smith began a series of site specific building interventions, creating his first wall cuttings in houses ready to be demolished and producing work often inaccessible to the public. Works that evolved from this period include Capital, 1995 an intervention in Gallery 49 at the British Museum; six wall cuttings at Tate Modern during its reconstruction in 1996, and at MACBA, Barcelona where he fired 35,000 staples – 1m wide and 25m long – into the walls of the museum. Preoccupied with exploring and experimenting in new media, recent projects by Smith, have included Broken Voices, The Foundling and in 2011 Caracol, a work made in Caracas, with twenty five singers. His most recent exhibition, Parallax, was a survey show of his work at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, curated by David Thorp. Smith is currently working on a project in Cuba with musicians and dancers.
