Trace(s)

About

Richard Ducker, Stewart Gough, Sophie Horton, Mark Houghton, Rachel Ichniowski, Janne Malmros, George Morris, Brychan Tudor. Curated by Patrick Michalopoulos. 3 — 26 October 2008 Fri-Sun 12-5pm You are invited to the private view on Thursday 2nd October 6-9pm Schwartz Gallery presents Trace(s), a multi-disciplinary group show that calls on artists to investigate the concept of ‘traces' as it is evidenced in their work alongside responses to the locality and specific character of the exhibition space, an entire floor of a disused early 20th century industrial block. The gallery is located in Hackney Wick, historically a light industrial zone that presently occupies a nondescript outcrop of warehouses and derelict spaces hemmed in by the London 2012 Olympic Games site, canals and a motorway. A psycho-geographical oddity, it exists on the margins of more regulated areas of urban developments; its subversive relationship to the urbane exposes the underbelly of urban planning and development and traces the unregulated trajectory of in-between spaces. A parallel dynamic of overlapping priorities and uses can be apprehended within the gallery space. The buildings where Schwartz Gallery is housed have been variously occupied by among others, a chemical works dating back to 1934, a Christmas cracker and a furniture manufacturer from 1941, a Burberry's gentlemen's weatherproof clothing manufacturer from 1962 and most recently a printing business. The gallery space exists in its raw state much as it was when the last occupants vacated it; it carries a multitude of traces and histories within its walls. The ambiguity seen in the format of the exhibition title ‘Trace/s' seeks to encourage a plurality and expansive set of possible avenues of investigation into the idea of ‘trace' as a multi-faceted domain; of an active type of tracing and delineating juxtaposed with a search for and collating/collecting of traces, of a response to and a re-working of the ‘traced'. Selected artists have employed a variety of methodologies that tap into a ‘consciousness' of the traced. By resurrecting a physicality of the traced within the gallery space connotations of history and the invisible are charged with an active trace-making and collating using light, site-specific installation, sculpture and image.