Mark Selby and Kate Terry

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Private View: Wednesday 10th February 2010, 6-10pm Exhibition dates: 10-21 February 2010 Opening times: Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm Artists' talk: 2pm, Saturday 20th February Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos and Ismail Erbil Schwartz Gallery presents the work of Mark Selby and Kate Terry as part of its new series of two-person shows for 2010 questioning exhibition-making practice. The programme aims to create an innovative platform for dialogue between the work of contemporary artists while not being a collaboration.Examining the practice of Selby and Terry one is drawn into a dynamic of ‘the-viewer-as-navigator' whose presence in the gallery space is set against ‘zones of activity' or ‘fields of looking' and of ‘looking again'. Terry's site-specific thread installation works with the architecture of the gallery space to question its function and physicality. Like a peculiar optical device akin to a two-way mirror, the individual threads map out and suggest an indeterminate number of planes and surfaces appearing and disappearing within the unchanging dimensions of the exhibition space. What begins as a delicate and tactile material is put through a rigorous process of measuring, pinning and connecting, transforming it into a tool for a dynamic yet elegant spatial intervention that twists and turns the space within and around it. The viewer is caught in an inseparable act of ‘looking through' and ‘looking at' the work in an enchanting inter-play between real and imagined architectures. Questions regarding the role of the viewer are re-visited in the site-specific installation Selby has created in the gallery space. An ambiguous relationship between the structures and implied functions of Selby's work, produce an effect of the ‘absent performer‘ or indeed of the ‘viewer-as-performer‘ in and around the installation. The work sets up a dialogue between binary opposites; interior and exterior space, seeing and being seen, technology and the hand made, as well as one between the inclusion and exclusion of knowledge as to the work's operation. The function of the work in the gallery context and the role of the viewer in Selby's installation hover indeterminately in a heady formal and metaphorical mix of received versus appropriated structural and communication models. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ Mark Selby completed his MA in Sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art in 2008. He was the 2009 recipient of the Clifford Chance / University of the Arts London Sculpture Award. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include ‘Transmission', Grey Area Gallery, Brighton (2010), ‘Fault Line: Art in the Age of Anxiety', The Nunnery, Bow Arts Trust, London (2009) ‘Affluenza', Clerkenwell, London (2009) and ‘Short Fall', Hand and Heart, Nottingham (2009). Mark Selby lives and works in London and is a Lecturer in Fine Art (FE) at UCA, Maidstone. http://manifesto-art.tumblr.com/tagged/Schwartz Kate Terry studied sculpture at Manchester Metropolitan University and received an MFA at the University of Guelph in Canada in 2002. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘10 x 10 x 10', Gooden project space, London (2009), ‘Empty Voluminous', 1000000mph, London (2007), ‘Interference'. Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada (2007). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Shadow Boxing', Home House, London (2009), ‘Parallax', Fieldgate Gallery, London (2008), ‘Heart of Glass', Shoreditch Town Hall, London (2008), ‘Soot From The Funnel', Lokaal 01, Holland (2008), ‘A Life of Their Own', curated by Richard Cork, Lismore Castle, Ireland, (2008). Kate Terry lives and works in London, and teaches at Camberwell College of Arts and Chelsea College of Art. http://www.kateterry.co.uk/ Copyright 2008-2010 Schwartz Gallery