ART MATTERS

By Enzo Marra

This month I’m going to be concentrating on a gallery space within a gallery space, which is challenging the concept of what an exhibition could and should be. The artists allowed to create a world in an intimate room without control or involvement by the gallery which is hosting their activities.

Gallery DODO (https://gallerydodo.com) is a temporary exhibition space situated off the south stairway in Phoenix Art Space, Brighton. It is artist-led and run on a voluntary basis, and is open to the public by appointment through Eventbrite, Instagram @aproposdodo or by emailing dodoinformation@yahoo.com.

The current programme of monthly exhibitions has invited two or three artists who share similar concerns or methods of working, to collaborate on producing an exhibition together. The intention is to allow them to initiate a dialogue as individual yet comparably connected artists, for them to explore relationships between their practices. Curating a show which presents this journey, via the cast of works that hang, sit and lean, physically present for those who visit and take them in.

The previous shows have included works by Lucy Brown and Sarah Pager in It’s What’s Inside, whose individual practices share a sculptural approach grounded in the body, and a playfulness with structural form and its supports. For their exhibition they worked collaboratively on a series of sculptures which they used as a departing point to explore the idea of a space within a space.

Never Seen and Yet Believed In was an exhibition devised between Hastings-based artist Scott Robertson and the London duo Sid and Jim. The show explored our faith in art and its objects by presenting the audience with a number of relevantly conspicuous absences.

James William Murray and Garth Gratrix explored concepts of queer materiality through contrasting aesthetic approaches, in Object Q/The Pursuit of Happiness.

Motion Sickness is an art collective based in Cambridge and Leipzig, Germany. Formed in 2018, the collective is made up of Denise Kehoe, Eleanor Breeze and Arabella Hilfiker. They presented a show which explored the concept of the technological utopia we live in, while being nostalgic and yearning for the simplicity of pure connection. They have exhibited internationally, including shows in London, Tokyo, Leipzig, Tallinn and Dublin. As a collective, they have exhibited at the Archive and the Contested Landscape exhibition as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas and have had a solo show Motion Sickness at STOCK Gallery, Manchester. Together they run Motion Sickness Project Space, a contemporary arts space in Cambridge.

They have also already shown or are set to show Hermione Allsopp, Poppy Whatmore, Joseph Cartwright, Ty Locke, Daniella Pink, Bill Leslie, Lucy Delano, Guy Bigland, Ally Mcginn, Louise Bristow, Andee Collard, Camila Caneque, Lisa Scantlebury, Annie Carpenter, Gabriella Gilmore, Jon Carritt and Dan Palmer.

If you looking for something to challenge or inspire you, I am sure some time at this gallery will be the perfect experience which you will remember and take home with you.