Simon Martin, Augustas Serapinas, Bridget Smith Group Exhibition Stanley Picker Gallery 2017

Exactly twenty years since its inaugural exhibition in February 1997, the Stanley Picker Gallery building reflects back upon itself, through a group show bringing together an architectural intervention by Simon Martin, a site-specific commission by Augustas Serapinas, and a series of photographic studies of the Picker House interiors by Bridget Smith.

Simon Martin is Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow at Kingston University. Building upon his past work on subjectivity and the built environment, he is undertaking new research around ideas of Objecthood, sound and memory. Whilst the first public manifestation of Martin’s fellowship commission will take place in the coming year, the artist has intervened in the current layout of the venue as an artistic gesture which nods to the Gallery’s past. Through a simple act of reinstating the original entrance, exposing previously hidden windows, and removing all artificial lighting, Martin reconfigures the building and its navigation, returning its essential architectural status, and highlighting its island location along the Hogsmill River, opposite Kingston School of Art.

Augustas Serapinas’ practice is invested in recomposing socially engaged spaces, in order to foreground and problematise the assumptions that shape them. By inverting the customary functions of objects and spatiality, Serapinas toys with the possibilities of the encounter – with art and with the social relations it engenders – as a phenomenon and an opportunity. Serapinas’ new commission at Stanley Picker Gallery is a secret project, entrusted by the artist to the infrastructure of the organisation, including its staff. As the project evolves over the course of the exhibition, its secrecy also transforms oscillating between facts and rumours.

In juxtaposition to the minimal intervention in the main exhibition space, Bridget Smith’s series of six photographs creates a unique portrait of the Picker House’s strikingly designed interiors. Stanley Picker, the arts patron after whom our Gallery is named, lived there until his death in 1982. The domestic setting remains immaculately preserved, very much as it was when Stanley resided there with his life-partner Paul Kavanagh. Smith’s images respond to the theatrical sensibility of the House, moving from the more public spaces filled with daylight and warm orange furnishings to the yellow and green subterranean light of the private rooms. Smith plays off the charged atmosphere of the House, detached from the life of its inhabitants. It is the exuberant artworks that are now the animated presence in the space, pointing to the life force once held within. To commemorate its 20th anniversary, the Gallery has produced a postcard edition of these six images, forming part of a special episodic mail-out designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, released over the course of this year.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24549