Carey Young: Mutual Release

About

Thomas Dane Gallery and ELECTRA are pleased to announce Mutual Release, a new commission consisting of print, text and video works based on a legal theme by the artist Carey Young. It is the first exhibition at the Thomas Dane Project Space, and the first in the series of new commissions Offer & Exchange: Sites of Negotiation in Contemporary Art, curated by Daniel McClean and Lisa Rosendahl and produced by ELECTRA. Can the legal contract be a form of art? Working closely with a team of lawyers specialising in media and intellectual property law, Carey Young has created a series of new works which invite the viewer to enter into, or be privy to contractual relationships based on viewing, owning and collecting art. By treating the law as an artistic medium, the artist allows the viewer to experience the otherwise abstract space of the contract. In the show, visitors will be offered a free work, which acquires the status of a work of art only once it has been signed by them. From then on, the owners and the artist enter into a contract, which ends only with the death of the artist and / or the owner. Art becomes bound to life and death. In a text work which plays on the legacies of Institutional Critique, the artist and the gallery enter into a contract which offers each 'complete mutual release'. In a new video, we see an actor interpret legal terms from a commercial contract as a form of acting exercise. With legally-trained executives increasingly running movie studios, news agencies and universities, Mutual Release addresses the legal ࠢ€˜lock downࠢ€™ of contemporary cultural life. Through this exhibition the artist further develops her interest in both the performative and the conceptual dimension of the law to explore its limits and to destablise its language. Offer and Exchange: Sites of Negotiation in Contemporary Art is a series of site-specific commissions inviting artists using legal contracts as artistic frameworks. Each commission has been conceived for one of the following sites in which art is made visible: (i) the commercial gallery; (ii) the corporate collection; (iii) the art magazine; (iv) the public institution; (v) the private collection; (vi) the auction house; (viii) the art fair. Mutual Release by Carey Young explores contractual relationships in the context of the commercial gallery.