Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division
Ric Warren
- Exhibition
- Text
- Images
- Essay
Exhibition
02/04/2011 – 24/04/2011
Text
David Dale Gallery & Studios present Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division, the first major Scottish solo exhibition by Glasgow based artist Ric Warren. Through large scale installation and prints Warren works toward an interpretation of contemporary urban theory which deliberately belies the exhibition title’s essayist invocation. The exhibition, offered as a synthesis, does not attempt at conclusions drawn from research – rather, distils such research into unavoidable questions for the viewer.
The installations that part constitutes Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division find them self at odds with the typical delineation of architectural and sculptural space, where the former makes space and the latter takes it, Warren’s installations operate in between demarcating and reifying it. Taking their reference from the construction site hoardings that divide cities, metonymic for progress, the installations are to sculpture what civic engineering is to architecture – functional separation. While addressing the barriers erected as shifting socio – spatial boundaries, Warren imposes his own without bias, with the disruption emphasising the symbiotic and semantic relationships that arise.
Also incorporating geometric and cartographic print work Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division considers the abstract and graphical groundwork implicit in rationalising these divisions. Work, which broken down into elemental signifiers, does nothing to illuminate the outcomes, only attempt to rationalise that which is unfinished and incoherent.
Ric Warren lives and works in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow School of Art 2008. Selected recent exhibitions include: LUDO, Pigeon Wing Studio Residency, August 2010; FUTUREPROOF (In collaboration with Katherine Gallacher, curated by PLACE projects), Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, January 2010; Constructs, Whitehouse Gallery, Glasgow, August 2009. Past work can be found at http://ricwarren.blogspot.com/
Images
Essay
David Dale Gallery & Studios present A discursive cartography of Borders, Boundaries and Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division. An ongoing investigation of Ric Warren’s work, against the backdrop of Warren’s recent exhibition at David Dale Gallery and his forthcoming one at MOT International. The text will be in collaboration with Nicola Wright, writer and curator of Warren’s MOT International exhibition.
Taking Nicola Wright’s essay in production as the touch paper, the investigation will be an ongoing discourse between interested parties with the deadline for conclusion set to coincide with the opening of Warren’s exhibition in MOT International mid-July. Between now and then the text will be in constant flux: elaborated; redacted; contradicted and addended by the curators at David Dale Gallery, Nicola Wright and, as arbiter, Ric Warren.
The aim is to arrive at a contentious synthesis on a contentious subject, drawing on the breadth of interpretation and intent to bind a text together without author authority or resolution. Mapping arbitrary limits.
