Centrifugal Projects
Location: London
Year founded: 2005
Address:
No fixed exhibition address
Contact details:
Tel: +44 794 384 4676
Email: info@centrifugalprojects.org
Website: centrifugalprojects.org
Indicative opening times:
Varies according to project
Current staff:
Director/founder – Ken Pratt
Centrifugal Projects is the initiative of curator and writer Ken Pratt.
The primary focus of Centrifugal Projects is direct curatorial art projects working with artists whether these take on the form of exhibitions projects, events, research or any other manifestation.
Ken Pratt/Centrifugal’s practice also includes extensive work as a writer and editor, not only confined to the visual arts, but extending into areas of design, music, fashion, film and theatre. Centrifugal also takes on other projects, alone or in collaboration, in arts allied disciplines such as cultural strategy, development work and project management.
Centrifugal often takes on the form of collaborations, loose or ongoing, with associates and other practitioners to best realise projects.
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Showing at Trajector:
Artists: Anton Cotteleer, Caron Geary (with Helen Watkins), Joris Ghekiere, Karin Hanssen, Philip Jones, Fiona MacDonald.
Salonaise is a thematic group presentation that responds specifically to the context of a hotel room, less in its context as a transient space and more focused on its intrinsic staging of domesticity.
The presentation draws together the very different works of artists whose work nonetheless directly references historic visual languages and art traditions in different ways and to different ends. What all share, at first glance, is an almost traditional quality that does not immediately denote the contemporary concerns and practices that have given rise to the work. In one sense, the work is both immediately at home within a domestic context and, in many cases, directly references historic tropes that were either specifically developed for display in private homes or ended up, by the advent of the private patron and collector, as prized genres of art assimilated into the realm of the home or private space.
Furthermore, in all cases, the apparently traditional aspect of the works remains entirely congruent with the artists’ highly contemporary practice and concerns. These aspects often reveal themselves more slowly or less transparently than the immediate reading or experience of the work. For example, a painting by Karin Hannsen intentionally referencing the formal compositions of Baroque animal paintings turns out, in fact, to be based on a still from the dystopian cult film ‘Soylent Green’ (1973) and is from a body of work in which Hanssen considers the near paradox of visions of the future arising in the past.
A similar intentional schism between the formal layer and the inherent content is present in the works of Joris Ghekiere. Here, the strange almost contemplative air of his subjects, reminiscent of historic devotional imagery, finds an unexpected appropriateness in his paintings of contemporary ‘live cam girls’.
Caron Geary’s perfomative self-portraits of her doppelganger Feral shot through a vintage lens conjure up notions of voyeuristic Victorian photography with all of its distinctly British anxieties about class, gender and sex. Only here it is unclear whether we are spying on her Dickensian rogue Feral as the object of the dominant gaze’s desire or as a servant peaking through the keyhole. Philip Jones’ works have an equally nineteenth century air about them. Although developed from life drawings made backstage at some of the most recent Paris fashion weeks, one can’t help think of the Impressionists’ voyeuristic capturing of everything from café life to ballet classes. In Anton Cotteleer’s work there is a similar conflation of time, though his concern is more focussed on using the traditional languages of representational sculpture –in this case of the heroic tradition- to raise rather ironic questions about representation and its intersection with formal layers such as the meaning embedded within materials or the connotations of surface, amongst other things. Fiona MacDonald’s small-scale sculptures in bold colours show a similar preoccupation with art historic languages, drawn as much from Italian Renaissance painting or Goya as from sculpture itself. In her particular case, the interest is at arriving at a position that sits on the border between abstraction and representation, the forms prompting some underlying memory of a familiar form absorbed into mass visual memory.
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