Phillip Lai makes new work for his first show at gallery Giti Nourbakhsch under the title ’open container’. The phrase is drawn from its use within legal jargon to describe the legally and then socially unnacceptable act of carrying and consuming alcohol in public. Although overt in nature, this subtly generates a self-awareness in public space and an assimilation of prohibitive code.
Its use here invites a speculation on our contemplative, wilful and desirous existence and projection, within and through these material and immaterial structures. It pulls in these structures as ones that often operate through languages of display, visibility, looking, seeing and being seen – creating often loosely demarcated, deferred or suspended spaces.
The work in the show deals with varying densities, pressures and pluralities of this speculation, working to assemble and fuse different levels and contexts of absorption and inflation, offering mixed motifs of productivity and waste. The work is conceived as inhabiting the gallery space with its own architecture of thought and making, and deliberately works between bold signification and an understanding drawn from its material senses.

A solo exhibition comprising 6 artworks installed in a gallery space of 166 square metres. The work is sculptural/installational, involving a wide range of materials and techniques (found object assemblies, sewn fabric objects, cast material, inflated plastic bags, video).
The exhibition was developed through research into various types of regulated space (including public, institutional, televisual) with particular interests in aspects of transparency and visibility, as simultaneously an unconfined sensibility and a means of open observation. Relevant to this is the frequent use of a conceptual ‘structure’, variously manifest as a motif of shelter, a condition of inhabitation (also regarded as the inhabitation of the gallery space by the artwork), a sense of encounter, or a situation that might be regarded as a scenario.

The work was exhibited between 13.12.08 – 24.01.09. It has been photographically re-presented on the gallery website (http://www.nourbakhsch.de/) and subsequently, in part, on the website of two other galleries representing the artists work. Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch closed in March 2012 but the website archive currently remains accessible. The work in the exhibition was the subject of features in MAP Magazine (Issue 17/Spring 2009 P.50-55) and Mousse magazine (Issue 17/Feb-Mar 2009 P.34-36) and appeared on Contemporary Art Daily (http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2008/12/phillip-lai-at-giti-nourbakhsch/)

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2989