Simon Patterson: Safari: an exhibition as expedition
https://www.dlwp.com/exhibition/simon-patterson/
The De La Warr Pavilion is delighted to announce its next show, Safari: an exhibition as expedition, an anthology of works by British artist Simon Patterson.
Spanning twenty-five years of work, and including a site-specific commission and an outside intervention, this exhibition takes the visitor on a mini safari through the De La Warr Pavilion. This trek encompasses wall drawings, sculpture, prints, photographs, video and installation.
Sited throughout the gallery, and interspersed between earlier works and personal objects, will be the commission Patterson has created for the De La Warr Pavilion. Entitled Safari, this new work comprises objects drawn from Bexhill and Hastings Museums, including artefacts collected by Annie Brassey (1839-87), the English writer and traveller who lived near Hastings, Bexhill-on-Sea’s neighbouring town. Brassey amassed an extensive collection of ethnographic objects during her voyages around the world on her steam yacht, Sunbeam, a vessel that doubled as a museum. Patterson’s selection includes spears, oars and other similarly shaped items.
Safari features several more contentious objects originating from local fraudsters, charlatans and fantasists. These include items relating to the notorious Piltdown Man, a paleoanthropological hoax perpetrated by Hastings-based Charles Dawson in 1912, in which miscellaneous bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human; and Grey Owl, the adopted name of Hastings-born Archibald Belaney (1888-1938), who passed himself off as Native American.
Also created especially for the De La Warr Pavilion, and working with Bexhill Sailing Club, Patterson will stage a temporary public spectacle entitled Seascape†. For the exhibition’s opening, the club will stage a ‘sea-battle’ during which coloured smoke grenades will be set off in a daytime display that references the commissioning of artists in the 17th and 18th centuries to design spectacles, including mock battles and firework displays, for their patrons. The intervention also references the different colours of smoke used to signal categories of engagement in war zones, changing daily to confound opposing forces.
Escape Routine, 2002, is the first work visitors encounter on entering the gallery. In this video, flight attendants alternately demonstrate in-flight safety procedures and feats of escapology, while voiceovers in English and Japanese read extracts from Harry Houdini’s writings on magic and stagecraft. By combining these unlikely acts, the artist opens up a range of alternative meanings.
Meanwhile, Manned Flight 1999, a man-lifting kite inscribed with the name of the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin, will be positioned in the De La Warr Pavilion’s iconic North Staircase, visible from outside. An itinerant work, Manned Flight 1999 has been displayed around the world, with the aim that it will ultimately reach the site outside Moscow where Gagarin was killed on a routine training flight.
Says Rosie Cooper, Head of Exhibitions, De La Warr Pavilion: ‘We are very excited to be working with Simon on his first solo show in the UK for almost a decade. The exhibition unfolds across the entire building and out to the sea, with the help of our neighbours the Bexhill Sailing Club. The partnership with Bexhill and Hastings Museums continues our relationships with these significant local institutions, who continue to provide us with an important way to understand where and who we are in the world.’
