Do you remember - or weren't you there?

About

London Gallery West is pleased to present a group show curated by the artists Philip Lee and Cally Trench. ‘Do You Remember It — Or Weren't You There?' brings together a diverse range of responsive multidisciplinary works from seventeen invited artists with a shared experience of having witnessed one of Lee and Trench's collaborative performances. Through these displays the exhibition will examine the role of the viewer whilst highlighting the challenges of preserving the presence, duration and location of performance art. Over the past three years, Lee and Trench have investigated various approaches to documenting and disseminating their collaborative performances. In 2010, they invited artists, writers and musicians to respond to their series of performances that involved the naked Lee and clothed Trench struggle to cover each other in clay slip whilst blindfolded. Instead of documenting the live performance, Lee and Trench wished to explore whether describing its essence through new materialised rhetorical artworks in another medium from the invited artists would evoke the intensity and emotion of the event to an audience not originally present. The resultant instinctive artworks presented include life-sized drawings, paintings in mud, sculpture, poems constructed from audience reactions, video and artist books. 'Do you remember it - or weren't you there?' features work by Marco Cali, Alison Carter Tai, Judy Goldhill, Jane Grisewood, Ingrid Jensen, Lydia Julien, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, Tony Moody, Claire Norman, Lorraine Pepper, Steve Perfect, Alan Prosser, Ann Rapstoff, Zahed Tajeddin, Cally Trench, Helen Udal, Mary Yacoob, and Silvia Ziranek. Philip Lee is a performance artist and doctoral student at the University of Westminster. Recent venues for his work have included the National Glass Centre in Sunderland (2011), the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent (2011), South Hill Park, and OVADA in Oxford, part of the Arts Council England funded, At Play 2012. Cally Trench is an artist whose work focuses on mapping and different viewpoints. Her work includes board games, time-lapse films, performance art, as well as paintings and drawings in which she maps places or people. She gained an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2007.