‘Space Forgets You’

Installation view 'Space Forgets You', Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 2022
Julia Chiang, Marc Hundley, John Giorno, Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way
Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh
08/07/2022—07/09/2022



‘Space Forgets You’ curated by The Modern Institute, which brings together works by John Giorno, Julia Chiang, Marc Hundley and Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh.

The exhibition explores the spirituality, physicality, political and emotional levels of the psychological attributes of place, and the ways in which these are experienced throughout human life. It shows what remains and creates an intimate atmosphere of remembrance and knowledge. Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way, is a partnership between Sheelagh Boyce and Annabelle Harty, which celebrates their shared interest in architecture and art through the creation of handsewn quilts and reconstructed fabric works. Working with friends’ used clothing and drawing inspiration from iconic buildings such as the Barbican, AWPCYW transform worn fabrics into physical forms that address and command space. They hold a kinship to the tapestry studio, hanging directly above the weavers, bringing a shared materiality to the historic building.

Julia Chiang’s work experiments with the interplay of a repeated pattern, which reflects her environment through colour and tenderness. Chiang’s detailed paintings take flat-coloured grounds as a setting for an intricate web of precise shapes and forms, flowing in converging directions and carefully constructed through layers of paint. Chiang’s works express the importance of the material, the wooden panel structure, and the translucent paint, and convey an aliveness and stillness through the repetition of the eclipse emblem, varying in size and transparency and responding to the spirituality of nature.

John Giorno, an American poet and performance artist, a stalwart of New York City, Giorno held a close kinship with William S Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, for whom he starred in the famous film, Sleep (1963). Giorno is considered the inventor of Performance Poetry, and of Dial-A-Poem – a free telephone line to connect listeners to recordings of original works of poetry. In 1965, he founded the Giorno Poetry Systems a nonprofit foundation, to promote his work and that of his peers and in 1984 the foundation started the AIDS Treatment Project, which disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars to help those suffering in the epidemic. Giorno’s words transformed to images in his Poem Paintings which are short excerpts from his writings. In collaboration with The John Giorno Foundation, we will present works from Giorno’s black and white series (2010-5), including one, the title of the exhibition.

Marc Hundley uses song lyrics to emote the place and time in which he resonates with from the catalogue of his life and personal history. A self-taught carpenter, Hundley’s furniture channels an atmosphere of loneliness and reflection that could be found in waiting rooms, or train stations, providing a time to stop and consider, but also as a setting for communal exchanges. The benches now represent another outlet of Hundley’s reminiscence and longing for interaction and company. In examining this relationship between the public and personal, Hundley invites us to share in his memories.