Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Kingston University
STRIPPERS
26 July – 21 September 2008
15 paintings on canvas
12 paintings on plastic
MDF structures and lighting
6 sculptures
Funded by Canada Council for the Arts, STRIPPERS was a solo exhibition of Cullinan Richards held at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver, in 2008. The duo was invited to submit an exhibition proposal following a visit of curator Cate Rimmer to their solo exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Warwick. The exhibition was an opportunity to extend their research enquiry into exhibition-making practices by stripping back the conventions of a large modernist gallery space to reveal the mechanisms and processes of art making usually hidden from view. The Vancouver space offered the additional challenge of activating the space through a combination of studio produced work (in London) and work produced on site.
Using the gallery architecture and five specially constructed supporting wall partitions, conceived as large paintings (each 8m x 2.5m), Cullinan Richards transformed the space into a form of expanded painting with the gallery walls acting as the framing device. In total, twenty-seven paintings were exhibited, including twelve large abstract works on plastic sheet (each 3m x 1.7m) spread over constructed metal table structures, disturbing hierarchies of display. Sculptural work, constructed on site, included three ‘fountain pieces’ (black plastic liners filled with pumping water, 2m x 2m x 50cm) that debunked modernist icons and enabled visual and visceral associations with the liquidity of paint and the untidy processes of making on display. These strategies of disturbance, imbued with underlying art historical and gender references, challenged conventions of exhibition making and inverted a modernist view of abstraction developing from figuration. They subsequently informed Cullinan Richards’ research methods in installations developed for the Whitechapel in 2009 and the Cooper Gallery in 2010.
STRIPPERS, reviewed by Canadianart, See It, 7 August 2008, is documented in Collapse 2008-11 [Collapse XXX, pp4-9; Collapse Texts, pp59-60] website publication: http://www.cullinanrichardscollapse.com/pdf/ ISBN 978-1-908452-06-1
