The Third Space, Regency Town House, 3rd-12th August
Polly Carter, Permanent Gallery curator, invited protoPLAY to participate in “The Third Space†exhibition, to make a responsive collective performance to the installations pieces of Jo Lathwood, Alice Cunningham and Miriam Austin, developing protoPLAY’s curatorial line on process and cultural recycling exploration. The artists in protoPLAY will also respond individually to the exhibition brief, producing works in response of the space, and working in situ.
The Regency Townhouse is in an apparent state of flux. Mid restoration, an absence of hierarchy between the building’s past, present and future sits in contrast to the binary layout design of the space, with a clear separation between the intended functions of two spaces, I.e between the basement, which was inhabited by servants, and the upstairs inhabited by the ruling class. The house’s design, and its current temporal state therefore provides the basic framework for the thematic of the exhibition. Through exposing a relationship between physical and metaphorical space with the introduction of ‘The Third Space,’ we intend to attempt a deconstruction of dualities, disturbing the potential for dualities to dominate our thinking about, and understanding of, the world– perhaps by drawing our attention to ways to circumvent them. The dualities/binaries that we are particularly interested in, and that the work will attempt to address will extend from the actual space to the binaries of individual/collective, male/female, public/private and seen/unseen, all of which relate to and draw similarities between social formation both in the past and presently.