KK TROVE
12 – 15 January 2023
Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Rd, Azad Maidan, Fort, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001, India
for Mumbai Gallery Weekend
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This site-responsive exhibition curated by Charlie Levine, will feature new work by Dawn Beckles, Dilip Chobisa, CJ Mahony, Sukhdev Rathod, Liz West and Alice Wilson. Inspired by the exhibition site, KK Chambers, the artists have all been designated an area or asset (such as the pillars or windows) to create work with and about. Each new piece not only links to the site but softly to the SqW:Lab themes that celebrate process and place. The title, KK Treasure, is a link back to Levine’s gallery in Birmingham, UK, called TROVE, that she ran between 2009 – 2013. The site being extremely uncanny to TROVE, while the themes of exploration are the same and an extension of Levine’s research into line, site and encounter.
These artists have been commissioned by Levine as they all make work that celebrates architecture and will invite audiences to look at the venue a little differently. From how the light floods through the windows and around the vast space, or the ‘frames’ that exist within the space in its current form. KK Treasure will consist of a mixture of installation, prints and interventions.
This exhibition launches KK Chambers as the new site for the SqW:Lab archives. Alongside the archive future fellows will be able to use the site for research, making, exhibiting and hosting events, talks and screenings.
Top L-R Dawn Beckles, Sukhdev Rathod, CJ Mahony
Bottom L-R: Alice Wilson, Dilip Chobisa, Liz West
Gallery text:
This site-responsive exhibition will feature new work by Dawn Beckles, Dilip Chobisa, CJ Mahony, Sukhdev Rathod, Liz West and Alice Wilson. Inspired by the exhibition site, KK Chambers, the artists have all been designated an area or asset (such as the pillars or windows) to create work with and about. Each new piece not only links to the site but softly to the SqW:Lab themes that celebrate process and place. The title, KK TROVE, is a link back to exhibition curator Charlie Levine’s gallery in Birmingham, UK, called TROVE, that she ran between 2009 – 2013. The site being extremely uncanny to TROVE, while the themes of exploration are the same and an extension of Levine’s research into line, site and encounter.
These artists have been commissioned as they all make work that celebrates architecture and will invite audiences to look at the venue a little differently. From how the light floods through the windows and around the vast space, or the ‘frames’ that exist within the space in its current form. KK TROVE will consist of a mixture of installation, prints and interventions. Colour and light are at the heart of many of the works, a celebration of the building’s past and this space’s creative future.
Dawn Beckles’ interpretation of the classic still life is seen here in her use of vibrant colour and exotic flora, inspired by her native Barbados, upon a domestic / functional object. The works on display are paintings on found wooden bannister stoppers. In a wood similar to the woods found in KK Chambers, and linking to the marks of craft and architecture left on the space, Dawn’s work creates something new, filled with colour and familiarity to help us think about the space’s future. This idea of bringing beauty to the mundane via imagination is something that links to the domestic through a critical creative lens.
The staircase is also visited in Dilip’s intervention. Dilip Chobisa asks audiences to question what is hidden in plain sight, and how it is animated when it is finally revealed – the perfect creative approach when working site responsively. Dilip is inviting us to re-look at something everyday through a new creative lens. How can a staircase, full of function, be re-imagined in a way where we question our role in the space, as well as how everything in it ties together and impacts upon one another? He disregards the laws of architecture and creates an order of intrigue and curiosity.
Sukhdev Rathod continues this narrative through a domestic ‘scene’ installed amongst the forest of pillars. The fragile and timid mise-en-scène might be, is a blurred backward vision of what once. Do these objects represent the domestic object or the art object? Or is it the mirage of a future potential that we see through slightly closed eyes? Either question is correct, as it is mainly about us, right here and now, both linked to the past and the future equidistantly.
Time is a recurring theme in several of the works in this exhibition, as is light and, in particular, the windows of KK Chambers. CJ Mahony’s series Softening I – VII is a new embossing printing technique that has used shapes and their movement across the pages to mimic the light in the space and how it bounces off the floor and walls. You’ll notice that some of the works are repeated as opposites, the result of a multi print process and an acknowledgement to architecture, to the four corners of a room and how the SqW:Lab directors talk about themselves. The work also celebrated the people who will use, visit and exhibit in KK Chambers, and will ultimately be imprinted upon it over time.
How light moves around the space is also explored in the new window installation by Liz West. This installation moves in a wave slowly around the venue throughout the day, illuminating different works, corners and crevices. Liz blurs the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, design and painting to create works that are both playful and immersive, with this work being a prime example of that. West creates vivid environments that mix luminous colour and radiant light with the aim to provoke a heightened sensory awareness in the viewer and to reexamine the space you exist in as you walk along the windows and the coloured lines of her work imprint upon you – right in that moment and as you continue throughout your day.
Finally we have the central sculptures by Alice Wilson. These works break down the window spaces into voids which are then re-built to create a new dynamic vision and understanding of the venue. This is something central to Alice’s work, understanding space, landscapes and how we occupy them. It is also a hopeful reaction to the building and, once again, its future potential. Specifically how SqW:Lab will ask audiences to re-think what they know and understand about art, architecture, design and the process of making and their role within them.
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