FULL SERVICE ___________________ Deborah Anzinger, Blue Curry, Leah Dixon, Luke Drozd, Alex Schady18-26 November 2017

FULL SERVICE ___________________

Deborah Anzinger, Blue Curry, Leah Dixon, Luke Drozd, Alex Schady
18-26 November 2017

Private View 6-9pm, Friday 17 November 2017
Gallery Open Sat-Sun 1-6pm

A nightclub doorman pulls out the vault’s secret key, and allows you to enter. The foreign beach attendant lays a color-coded towel on your lounger. The photographer directs your body to situate itself intently, but aloofly inside of the camera’s frame. “Just be yourself.” You left the house wearing a ‘conversation-starter’- something a bit flamboyant and memorable. “My humility will complicate the boldness of my outfit,” you think. You possess enough cultural references to transcend realities. You feel both intrigued, but safe. Because in fact, everyone and everything in this new space is a ballast of the architecture that formulates your shared encounter. And you TRUST it, and so do they.

Biogs

Deborah Anzinger is a multi-disciplinary artist from Jamaica. Her current work imagines decolonised spaces, through disruptions of gendered and raced paradigms of ecology. Anzinger’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (Brooklyn, NY), the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (Nassau, Bahamas), Sargent's Daughters (New York, NY), Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York, NY) and featured in two solo projects at the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica). She was recipient of a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Anzinger is founder of the contemporary art initiative New Local Space (Kingston, Jamaica). www.deborahanzinger.com

Blue Curry is an artist from The Bahamas living in London who works primarily in sculpture and installation. He uses an idiosyncratic language of commonplace objects and found materials to engage with themes of exoticism, tourism and culture. He has exhibited extensively, participating in the Liverpool, SITE Santa Fe and Jamaica Biennials, as well as in group shows at PPOW Gallery in New York, The Art Museum of the Americas in Washington DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He is currently showing work in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of The Caribbean Archipelago at the Museum of Latin American Art in California. www.bluecurry.com

Leah Dixon is a sculptor living in New York City and Berlin. She builds structures, performances, and spatial interventions which address inconsistencies that have shaped her consumption of socio-political events as an American woman. Her labor-intensive processes culminate in interactive architectural forms which reference fallen monuments, games, toys, the military, nightlife, and other spaces for public action. Dixon has exhibited widely, including in The Nicaraguan Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, Ludlow 38 MINI/Goethe Institut New York, Regina Rex Gallery New York, Edel Assanti Gallery in London, and SORT Gallery in Vienna. Additionally Dixon co-owns and creatively directs Beverly's - a bar, club, and curatorial experiment in Lower Manhattan. She holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and was a fellowship recipient to The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Dixon is a current nominee for the 2018 United States Artists Fellowship. www.leahdixonart.com

Luke Drozd is a London based artist and maker. His work takes a variety of forms focussing on print and sculptural works, alongside performance as part of duo Reet Maff'l. He also works collaboratively with the UK Poster Association (UKPA), and is one half of curatorial team 38b Projects. He is for art that is odd and joyous and things that are the right side of wrong. www.lukedrozd.com

Alex Schady is a London based artist with a broad interdisciplinary practice. He shows widely both nationally and internationally and recent exhibitions include Rulers at Camden Arts Centre in London and the politics of shapes and forms at the Arts Cube in Jerusalem. Current work explores the possibility of representing sculpture within a time-based medium. Adopting the conventions of the cinematic he uses film to explore the objectness of sculpture and consider how two disciplines with different notions of time and materiality can coexist.
Schady co-founded Five Years in 1998. This is an artist run gallery where programming maintains a direct relationship to practice. It explores the links between the production and exhibition of work and the discourses which inform it.
As well as this Schady also works on group projects that explore the ethics and limits of collaboration when working with groups of school children and young adults. Recent examples of this were shown at Camden Arts Centre and Tate Modern.

Deborah (Jamaica), Blue (Bahamas), Leah (US), Luke (UK), and Alex (UK) are all artists who confuse the space between escapism and confrontation. Through restless construction and reconfiguration, their work draws attention to the mechanics of escapism, and the props of release. All works on view employ a deep democracy of materials, which question an audience’s deflected understanding of experiential worth, and playfully call upon the structures that a voyeuring audience often find difficult to confront— the labor, production, and allies of experience.

The artists expose objects’ and bodies’ potential to transform our conditions— to heighten our perceived liberties. They highlight the line between public perception, and an identified participation in the curated control-centers that define those perceptions. Through their various media, these artists undermine commercial and industrial production value, to question the ways we understand our relationships to the workers, stages, and constructions that stylize our cohabitation of space.