exhibition

Please Drive Slowly Through Our Village

Artists Tom Dale, Annabel Elgar, Matt Golden, Angie Hicks, Simon Willems

08.Jul.11 - 07.Aug.11
Fri - Sun, 6 - 9 pm

Curators Simon Willems

FOLD Gallery
2nd Floor
32 Fortescue Ave
London E8 3QB
02089853590
info@foldgallery.com
www.foldgallery.com
Tube Bethnal Green; Bus 26, 48, 55, 106, 254, Hackney / Bethnal Green

Please drive slowly through our village brings together a number of artists exploring the representation of ‘support’ and ‘structure’ as a failed, dysfunctional and collapsible proposition. Working within a paradoxical remit, they share the need to suggest an unworkable solution. Function and permanence becomes a misnomer, where the architectural model can be read as a licence to present its own shortcomings. What we are left with is a playful dynamic that recognises the value of vulnerability and failure as integral elements within a metaphorical and conceptual framework of making.


The familiar and the strange work in tandem here to confound any assumptions the viewer might place in the show’s logic and construction. A rack of climbing wall sections slumps pathetically in the corner, peppered with the garish grippings of a play-dough riot. An absurdist critique on a modernist agenda, we are forced to interrogate these works, as they map out a broken terrain of arrested development. The wry sentiment of the title creates a vacuum of burgeoning wit gently gathering pace. A skeletal assemblage of weathered picture frames reconfigured into a chair sits complete with a fractured portrait.


There is a tension between convenience and obsolescence in the various pieces: A bread castle, the clichéd ingredient of prison sculpture, killing time, spars out with the reversed re-enactment of a smashed iron, cast and documented with outmoded film and graphics. Please drive slowly through our village offers up an interesting trajectory, carving out a territory less concerned with airbrushed results than a leaking process.