A Place For You To Dream

About

Exhibiting artists: Max Colson, Katy Connor, Felicity Hammond, Laura Yuile

Curated by: ANGL collective

Kindly supported by Goldsmiths Annual Fund and Arts Council England.

If distinguishing the private from the public was a central feature for architecture and design in the industrial age, these borders are now blurring and homes are increasingly designed to mirror computer-generated images of hyper-clean buildings and urban spaces. Images of generically luxurious domestic spaces are everywhere around us, printed on the hoardings of construction sites, encouraging us to invest in a sleek, sanitized vision of the future city. These images are there to sell an impossible life of glamorous living that you can dream one day will be yours. Just imagine, going to work everyday in a flexible and high-tech working space, to then come back to your million pound one-bedroom flat in which every detail has been rendered to look like a glossy magazine image. A place for you to dream, and a life exclusively designed. Set in an office tower in East India Quay currently awaiting redevelopment, A Place For You To Dream will present work by four artists who question the dynamics at play at the intersection between digital rendering, marketing aesthetics and the tangible effects of these tendencies on domestic spaces and people’s lives.

Max Colson will present a new video work revolving around the unrealised plans for ‘iceberg houses’: controversial proposals that involve expanding properties to five times their size below the ground, in order to accommodate for luxuries such as cinemas, swimming pools and private car parks.

Katy Connor’s installation and mobile app PURE FLOW (2012) allows visitors and users to perceive the digital mesh of signal bouncing against architectonic structures by subverting the use-value of GPS as a surveying and navigational tool, revealing these invisible data streams and highlighting their increasing ubiquity in domestic and urban spaces.

Felicity Hammond’s new version of Stone Effect (2016) is an installation made of construction materials that create an unstable structure, thus functioning in opposition to building sites. The work combines the rawness of pipes and concrete with the glossy appearance of the rocks as designed objects, which recall the aesthetics of real estate brochures.

Laura Yuile’s new installation draws inspiration from retail and showroom display techniques, the decorative form of various objects used in the reinforcement of private property, and the demarcation of the ‘outside’. For her performance on the opening night, Yuile plans to present a new clothing line that she has designed. On 17 February, Yuile will also organise an off-site event called Asset Arrest, a performance-tour where she enacts an undercover real estate agent facilitating viewings of properties within London “that you can’t afford and have no intention of buying”.

Dr. Louis Moreno (Goldsmiths, University of London) will lead a walking tour of East India Quay and Canary Wharf areas on 25 February, seeking to engage the public in exploring spatial relationships and political economic forces that shape the built environment.