Stanley Picker Gallery and our sister venue, Dorich House Museum are pleased and excited to be collaborating with Kingston University’s Dance programme on a new body of performance inspired by artist Jessi Reaves’ (b. 1986) first UK institutional solo show, 31 Candles
Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, 31 Candles is conceived site-specifically for Dorich House Museum, the Gallery’s partner venue and former studio home of the Russian sculptor, artist and designer Dora Gordine and her husband the Hon. Richard Hare, a scholar of Russian art and literature. The exhibition features new and visually enticing, works by Reaves as well as new collaborative sculptures by Reaves & Kronz (Waiting for Boots), presented across four rooms in which the displays of furniture and items from the Museum collection have been partially reconfigured as part of the artists’ intervention.
In the first of their workshops, Level 5 (second year) BA Dance students undertook a guided museum and exhibition tour, in which they handled Gordine’s bronze sculptures of dancers and attempted to recreate some her most ‘imaginative’ forms. They also made observational drawings of favourite ‘floating heads’, and generated free writing to capture first impressions.
Students, under the tutelage of course lecturers Daniela Perazzo Domm and Beatrice Jarvis, are now being challenged to team up in small groups to create 2-3 minute site-specific dance sequences inspired by their experiences and new-found knowledge of the house and its contemporary intervention. Key movements and moments, intertwined, will lead audiences on an alternative and visually interactive journey around the house.
Dancers, currently workshopping their ideas, will share their pieces in a private performance for their peers, while the extended tour will be documented by Kingston University BA Fine Art students, for public presentation online.
More information to follow.