Having explored issues of cumulative labor, exhibition display, and support structures through her practice as an artist, teacher and co-founder of Eastside Projects in Birmingham, UK, Céline Condorelli presents her first US solo show, Epilogue, as the final project at the Broome Street storefront of P! Epilogue also marks the start of a collaboration between P! and Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University London. Staged across the two venues throughout 2017, the overall project draws parallels and contrasts between the work of Condorelli and the late designer and artist Elaine Lustig Cohen.
Within Condorelli’s practice, thinking and producing are conjoined. This exhibition assembles pre-existing and newly commissioned works, alongside a program of discursive events, to consider how history, politics, and individual ethics temper the judgments of artistic legacy.
At the heart of the exhibition is Bauhaus-trained designer and artist Herbert Bayer’s Extended Field of Visiondrawing (1930), borrowed from a private collection for Condorelli’s project. Highly influential in its time—and now emblematic of an entire era of exhibition design—the drawing features an exaggerated eye atop a male visitor’s body that observes planes of display in every direction. Yet the work also points to several blind spots within existing histories: Bayer’s ambiguous position during the rise of National Socialism, compounded by his later reticence to acknowledge this compromise. Furthermore, the focus on sight alone highlights inherent exclusions within such a disembodied understanding of exhibitions.
Condorelli exhibits works that reflect on Bayer’s legacy and P!’s institutional narrative. An abstract, window-scale vinyl frames the views between storefront and street. This is complemented by a multi-layered print on acrylic glass in a custom hinged frame, which hides and reveals simultaneously. Within the storefront, a series of large-scale drawings catalogue Condorelli’s practice to date, as both documentation and extension of past works.
Other sculptural pieces relate to the conditions of the gallery space and directly address Bayer’s drawing. For Alteration to Existing Conditions, Condorelli recycles fragments from P!’s display architecture, which are repurposed within an upholstered seating unit for visitors to rest, converse, and observe. Constructed from locally-sourced corrugated plastic, a sculptural room divider / curtain, Epilogue, articulates the show’s space while adding a further layer of color and transparency.
The exhibition’s final work greets the street: set in a custom typeface, the storefront awning spells after in reverse. This simple preposition evokes the afterlives and legacies of exhibition spaces—as ongoing loops of production and display, in which works and ideas initiate new contexts for others to inhabit. In this spirit, the exhibition will travel to Stanley Picker Gallery as part of a broader project, continuing the spirit of P! within a different forum.