Design for a Fold     [ exhibition ]      (2015)

Design for a Fold     [ exhibition ]      (2015)

Adam Chodzko
Design for a Fold
16 October – 21 November 2015
Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury
(in association with Canterbury Christ Church University)

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Design for a Fold is an installation incorporating many of Chodzko’s works made ‘locally’ since his move to Kent in 2001. Mapping his particular engagement with diverse places, times and communities where he lives and works in Whitstable, alongside new work, the exhibition seeks to root, or fold, the idea of the local within another, apparently remote, alien and distant place; Beppu, Japan.

Design for a Fold both expands, compresses and twists an understanding of a home environment into a new form that questions assumptions of who, what, when and where we might be within its landscape and communities. Chodzko suggests, through recontextualising part of his archive of artworks, new, dynamic and global connections that weave together the real and the hidden into propositions for new collective mythologies. Earlier works are reconfigured here in a physically compressed or compiled form in order to support and reveal each other, sacrificing their usual spatial autonomy in order to create a form of shared economics of  space, material, and meaning to occur together at exactly the same moment in time. For example, the interpretation panel from Pyramid (2008) appears to have been stolen and buckled in order to modify it into a skateboard ramp, its immediate reverse forms a screen for Guide for a Parade with Two Masks (2004) led to by an inclined screen playing Design for a Carnival (2003).  A plinth displaying Ark-Eye (2015) from Great Expectations (2015) also contains in close proximity New Wing.  A Rehearsal for a Faulty Projector (2011). 

“…I treated the gallery as a kind of vortex that was drawing this Kentish work of mine, with its diverse locations and communities (from Shellness on the Isle of Sheppey, to Blean woods, to a room in a house in Margate etc) into almost impossibly close arrangements with each other. I had made a lot of the work for this exhibition in Beppu, Japan, with the idea that the installation was really a work curated by ‘Japan’. An accompanying narrative told of an artist who had come from Kent believing that his work from there was somehow being created or completed by sources of geothermal energy at the other side of the globe, in Beppu, Japan. In a sense the exhibition at Sidney Cooper Gallery was, somehow, ‘an exhibition in Japan’, despite, (or because of), its numerous mappings of the local. Again, a series of interlocking empathies about looking were something I was trying to achieve with this installation…”
Excerpt from Interview for Canterbury Christ Church University Inspire magazine

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Related works:

Great Expectations  (2015)
Somewhere Else, In Order to Complete Them  (2015)
That night, in a clearing  in a walnut forest,  lit by the city lights,  the carnival changed,  in order to tell a new story. (There is no translation)     (2015)
Transmitters    (1991 – )