GSA Exhibitions Report attached for info.

Exhibition photography by SMITH/STEWART.

SMITH/STEWART PRESENT TENSE
A solo exhibition of three new sculptural installations and unannounced public performance (Reid Gallery)
Sculptural work and printed material (6 x vitrines, Reid Ground Floor Corridor)

Primary Objectives:

- A significant body of work for solo exhibition, PRESENT TENSE, made through ongoing practical, material, relational experimentation & philosophical enquiry
- This investigation primarily takes shape in the central form of the most ambitious work we’ve made to date, an ‘impossible’ structure, exploring power & control
- To develop an iterative focus through critical conversations, which expand on the context of our work & process as research

Our research practice as SMITH/STEWART is art-based research, where ‘the artist-researchers develop and reflect on their own creative process which is subjective in practice’ (Borgdorff, 2011).

Context:
The contemporary socio-political context of the world from which our work emerges, in these times of conflict, displacement & existential uncertainty, gives urgency to our enquiry. Our work interrogates notions of power, authority & the orchestration of people, compelling us to ask challenging questions, the timeliness of which is vital. The situation of the adjacent devastated Mackintosh building Reid also resonates with the work.

Our uncompromising enquiry raises unsettling tensions. The work creates new possibilities/knowledge by exploiting the instrinsic properties of particular material collisions, not only in individual pieces but in relationships between works & by directly co-opting the exhibition space to form a charged environment. Our rigorous, dialogic enquiry, comes from a collaborative relationship, underpinning everything: Exploring trust, commitment, intimacy, duality, disruption & interconnectedness, specifically at the interface of sculpture & live/recorded performance, resulting in works which construct situations, in which the viewer/body is central. “The meaning is lacking without the participation of the recipient” (Ulrich Loock, ‘Smith/Stewart: Medium as Metaphor’).

Key contemporary artists working in the field include Miroslaw Balka, Alistair MacLennan, Anne Imhof. The exacting spare writing of Samuel Beckett; Rosalind Krauss’ ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, proposing “video’s real medium is a psychological situation”; questions of power/co-existence in Jackie Wang’s (2018) ‘Carceral Capitalism’ & psychiatrist R D Laing’s, ‘Knots’ (1970) series of dialogue-scenarios describing the intricacies of human relationships of love, dependency & uncertainty, are contextual touchstones.
Fundamentally our lens remains our relationship, relative to wider universal issues of the present.

Overarching Research question:
What are the ways in which our work can explore ideas of duality in terms of connection & separation, power & powerlessness, through collaboration, sculptural materiality, installation, performance?

Questions relating to Reid iteration:
- How does our pared-back work confront the body of the viewer, in an intense situation which stays with them?
- What are the impacts of specific material choices & their different poetic/emotional registers of meaning?
- How does the viewer’s own experience affect their response to the work/s & the readings that may arise?
'Each subject is a participant. Each viewer is a subject. Each subject is a viewer'. (Laura Edbrook, The Fruit of Their Actions, MAP 25)

Methodology:
- Exhibition making: Our sculptural installation/s substantively push material to extremes, expanding the space to the edge of what’s possible. Here, the metaphorical & physical weight of brutal steel interconnecting beams, against the delicacy of a piece of fabric, the humanity of an item of clothing, or the resonance of sound. Large-scale physical boundaries which disrupt space/direct the viewer, co-exist with intimate interpersonal scale of two people holding hands, connected by a double ring. Adjacent mechanised pieces relentlessly thump out time, acoustically falling in/out of sync. In addition (in the Reid corridor), we present a hinterland of selected artefacts from our current process, never usually shown.

- Critical conversation & reflection: Two critical conversations as part of the process to develop the framing of our research practice, with Ross Birrell (GSA) & Viviana Checchia, Director, Void Art Centre, Derry & researcher with ‘Research Agency’ project.

Accompanying exhibition events included:
- an artist led gallery tour
- SMITH/STEWART video screening of early single screen works, introduced by Laura Haynes, followed by audience Q+A

Future outputs TBC:
- Publication
- Journal
- Exhibitions