Output details

A Fire in the Masters House is Set

A Fire in the Master’s House is Set was a public sector group exhibition curated by Morrissey and commissioned by Chapter, Cardiff, the leading centre in Wales for the presentation of contemporary art. The output was based on an extensive body of practice-based research into the formulation of ‘propositional’ curating explored through exhibitions commissioned for publicly funded galleries since 1999.

This exhibition (8 July-4 September 2011) brought together the work of fourteen internationally recognized artists to explore protest and resistance to power structures combined with ideas of ‘latency’. The term latency here refers to the idea of an artwork communicating that it holds a certain power to create change within it but this has yet to be unlocked. The exhibition created a framework of suggestion through the selection of works and accompanying text that posited the idea of the exhibition as ‘spell’ – a combation of oblique elements that when brought together under a specific rubric could engender a transformation of the individual elements into something far greater in meaning and power. Through doing this, the curator posed the idea of the spell as a metaphor for curatorial practice. The exhibition thus set out to explore a somewhat contradictory space, a space where ideas of political, social or youthful resistance are invoked but simultaneously overlaid with the idea of the latent or the mute. It created a framework in which ideas of social defiance, protest, opposition, hedonism - so often the social language of music culture - are invoked but distanced or enfolded within abstracted forms.

The exhibition was reviewed by David Trigg, Art Review, issue 53 (October 2011); and Luke Healey, Aesthetica online (2 August 2011).