Exhibition
28.05 – 19.06.11

Preview
Friday 27 May | 7 - 9

Open
Friday - Sunday | 12 - 5
Or by appointment

David Dale Gallery & Studios are pleased to present Container and Contents, an exhibition of new work by Naomi Bell, Dominic Samsworth & Joanna Waclawski. Container and Contents brings Bell, Samsworth and Waclawski together under the auspices of common, cultural and social space and its (re)interpretation in shifting location and presentation. Expanding tangentially from Daniel Buren’s 1970 text Beware, the exhibition intends to draw together disparate readings of the institution (in an expanded definition) through the “…constant relationship between the container (location) and the contents (the total proposition)”¹ with the view that “…this relationship is always annulled or reinvoked by the next presentation”².

Naomi Bell, working in the parameters of the cultural space, creates sculptural installations and prints that accentuate space through form and light, creating surfaces and volumes that reflect and interfere with surrounding architectural structures. In reifying this particular space through the intuitive use of materials, Bell works through shorthand references to periods and styles in art history, taking definitions of mathematics and Gestalt psychology as loaded reference points to edify the vacuous gallery space.

Dominic Samsworth reinforces the common within the cultural space, and through usurping it creates monumentality out of nothing, a vacant celebration. For Container and Contents, Samsworth will appropriate the existing fluorescent lights into an installation, which in negating the functionality of these fixtures, disrupts the form and intention of the gallery as well as it’s predisposition to the ideals of the white cube – highlighting the impermanence and fragility of man-made structures and ideas.

Joanna Waclawski represents the social space through photography, abstracting the inherently familiar to a garish mismatch of colours and shapes. Waclawski toys with the desensitised memory of these locations, places frequently visited and used but forgotten and unnoticed because of their very attempts at the opposite. Waclawski’s images give no hint to location, existing as hopeless acts of preservation destroying what it attempts to secure. Locations which are annulled by their very (re)presentation.

1. Daniel Buren, Beware, Studio International, vol.179, no.920, London, 1970, Trans. Charles Harrison, p.103
2. Ibid

Naomi Bell lives and works in London. She graduated in 2010 from The Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include RSA: New Contemporaries 2011, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, March 2011. Exsto (solo commission), One Regent Street, Glasgow, 2010; and Transition (solo show), Che Camille, Glasgow, 2010.

Dominic Samsworth lives and works in Glasgow. He graduated in 2010 from The Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include Off the Bone with Alan Stanners, The Duchy, Glasgow, and RGI New Graduate Show, Glasgow, both in 2010.

Joanna Waclawski lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated in 2010 from The Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include Futureproof, Streetlevel Photoworks, Glasgow, August 2010; and Fleeto, Shoreditch Town Hall (basement), London, July 2010. Upcoming exhibitions include solo photographic work at Bellshill Cultural Centre, Glasgow, May 2011.