dinosaurkilby

WARWICK ARTS CENTRE: GALLERY LATES EXPRESSION OF INTEREST SCARROTT & KILBY

ARTISTS: Emily Scarrott + Dinosaur Kilby

WEBSITE: https://linktr.ee/scarrottandkilby

INSTAGRAM: @eemilyscarrottt + @dinosaurkilby

1. WHY ARE YOU INTERESTED IN WORKING ON THE GALLERY LATES PROGRAMME?

We like the idea of a Gallery Late event because it has an after-hours element to it. It’s the gallery space but slightly different. A space where a visitation can happen, a haunting. We want to engage with new audiences and believe that this is a great opportunity to do that. We have worked extensively with audiences in the Midlands, but not in Warwickshire specifically, so this is an exciting chance to develop this connection. An important part of our collaborative practice is to critically engage with institutional exhibition making and curation. Phantom Sculpture presents a survey of contemporary sculpture and choice historical works; We want to engage with this exhibition, and how these works can be seen through a contemporary lens, through a collaborative and performative practice.

2. WHAT THEMES ARE YOU INTERESTED IN AND WORKING ON?

🦖 Dinosaur Kilby is an artist-curator interested in exhibition making. Phantom Sculpture presents an interest because of the link to Mark Fisher. In my practice I’m interested in hauntings, and how contemporary England is feeling the ramifications of a colonial history. Recently I've developed work with Ishmail De Niro about this history, asking the question “what do our mother’s and father’s leave us?”, looking at this through the perspective of a young asian male.

With Phantom Sculpture I'm interested in exploring how sculptural ghosts can haunt art history, and not allow space for anything new to be made. Is art history doomed to be repeated? What is an original creative act? And how do gallery spaces help or hinder the artist?

🥚 Emily Scarrott is an artist/writer/researcher informed by an ongoing preoccupation with speculative fiction, and a curiosity in how we might practise desired worlds into being. In my practice, I am interested in how collaborative exchanges of ideas can be used to dismantle authoritative and binary distributions of knowledge.

With this comes an interest in how the artworks exhibited in Phantom Sculpture take up space. How is gender, race, privilege, and cultural experience embodied in sculptural practice? When these existences are put in a room together, will they get on? Do they feel comfortable or awkward when standing next to one another? How can we expose these dynamics for an audience who may not be fluent in the languages of art history?

👬 Our collaborative practice has been developed over the past 5 years, we share themes of humour in art, and the immediacy of performance. We share an interest in institutional curation and bringing live art into these spaces. We make things that are present and collaborative.

3. CAN YOU PROVIDE A SNAPSHOT OF THE KIND OF WORK OR CONCEPT THAT YOU MIGHT BRING TO THE EVENT?

We propose that we will write and devise a play that will be performed live during the gallery late event. The play will characterise the sculptures exhibited in Phantom Sculpture, staging conversations, relationships, and tensions between the artworks and exploring the historical and contemporary juxtapositions within the exhibition.

We will select several of the sculptures to be characters in the play, using their voice as well as the voice of the artist that made it.

We are interested in how the show’s appraisal of art history by new generations of sculptural practice might be embodied within live performance and fictional narratives; If these artworks could speak to each other, what would they say?

This play will be written collaboratively between Emily and Dinosaur, and if permitting another group of people that hopefully Warwick Arts Centre can help facilitate. This multiplicity of voices will allow the play to develop in different directions and break down the authorship of the artwork. Sculpture is often a joint partnership, and we look to echo this narrative when making a performance for the gallery.

The cast for the play may consist of local artists, art students, groups within Warwick University and audience members for the late. Giving voice and participation to non-artists is a key element in our practice, allowing for a ‘real world’ reading of the work. Our ambitions are to work horizontally with the performers, encouraging them to improvise, imagine and expand the script beyond our original writing.

The stage setting is the exhibition, and each sculpture will be activated in some way by our performance. Using step ladders, cardboard props, masks and megaphones to challenge the heteronormativity of white cube spaces, we will look to untangle the relationship of gender to sculpture.

This would be thematically linked to Mark Fisher’s writing on hauntology. We want to produce a soundtrack for the performance that would feature Fisher’s own music tastes, such as Tricky and Burial. This is still very much the starting point of this work, and we would look to develop it collaboratively.

We were unsuccessful in this application. We wrote it anyway.

Phantom Sculpture A Play

SCENE 1

DK walks into the gallery, stand still and sings -

“The Phantom of the Sculpture is here, inside your mind!”

DK walks over to the Willam Turnbull, points at it “Dead”

DK walks over to the Anthony Caro, points at it “Dead”

DK walks over to the Barbara Hepworth, points at it “Dead”

DK: We’re dealing with ghosts amongst the living.

DK: And that essentially is the problem, how do we oust the ghosts. We don’t need them hanging around, we need to make new things. Break the pattern.

Gallery Assistant: Feeling saucy today? On your immediate right, there is some adult imagery. It might be what you’re into, so I won’t judge if it's your first stop ;) ;) ;)

Virgin Variations (JD 2019): 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 (THIRTY SIX EIGHTEENS )

Audience: (SHOUTS) Get out of the fucking way I want to see the show!

Crystal Landlord: “Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in. Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in, not tonight mate, not tonight.”

Warm Inside: (Makes gentle pigeon noises) + (CBeeBies noises)

Crystal Landlord: RENTS GOING UP BALDOCK, ITS NOT STAYING WARM INSIDE WITHOUT AN EXTRA BUCK A MONTH, COST OF LIVING CRISIS MATE, I CANT KEEP ON OUT THE GOODNESS OF ME ‘EART

Warm Inside: :( (The three Warm Inside sculptures sit together and start counting their change)

Crystal Landlord: YOU’VE GOT TO BE MORE LIKE DARLING, PACK IT IN, LOOK HOW MUCH IS GOING ON IN THERE, SMALL SPACE, BIG ART.

Virgin Variations: NIEUW!!! NIEUW!!! NEIUW!!!

Crystal Landlord: YOU DON'T MESS WITH A GUY WHOS GOT SNAKE FOR FEET.

Snakes: SSSSSS

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SCENE 2

DK: UP, DOWN, RIGHT. UP, DOWN, RIGHT. UP, DOWN, RIGHT. UP, DOWN, RIGHT. UP, DOWN, RIGHT. UP, DOWN, RIGHT, FUCK.

DK: Boxing tits on a garbage bin. It’s really red, saturated bright red. What’s the chair, rusty white metal garden chair.

GOOD THOUGHTS BAD THOUGHTS: High high tops, white converse, four arms, gloved up, ready to deck you.

DK: I had that metal floor pattern in my childhood bedroom, but it was lino, what’s it called that pattern? With like the 4 lines going one way and then 4 lines going the other way. Well whatever it’s called I had it in my bedroom, camo painted feature well and metal lino floor, take that Richard Deacon.

RD: Art doesn't actually fully explain itself. You can come at it with a different route another time.

DK: That doesn’t help Richard, what does it mean? I need to know what it means. It says right here in the booklet your abstract forms have placed you at the forefront of british sculpture, but this is rubbish.

RD: I think that when we look at art, one of the things we want to do is to attribute meanings. We try to uncover what it is that the artist is trying to do in this or that thing. This is a mode of transaction which at its simplest is to do with a certain kind of recognition—we recognize that something resembles something else. We don’t only do this in looking at art; seeing resemblances and recognizing that things look like other things is part of how we meet the world, but it becomes very focused in looking at art. The question for me is whether resemblance can be detached from objects. That quote about the drawings has to do with trying to work out whether the conjunctions of resemblance, looking like, reminding of, referring to, are simple associative categories or whether they refer to something else. Metaphor is an example of a way in which objects can be put in relationship without them having any necessary resemblance; two things are put into conjunction and then you see the one in the other. It was that ability to evoke those kinds of responses—looking like, resemblance, and so on—which I had been trying to create. It requires a certain level of ambiguity, a certain level of giving and taking away at the same time. That’s the kind of thing that I was interested in.

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SCENE 3

I don’t like Anthony Caro, but to be fair this is a good one. It looks like a giant bug has wandered in, or is it a climbing frame? It’s a bug, or an animal of some sort, bison, tortoise, limping land crab. I do want to climb on it, I think about raising my leg up to put my foot on the beam, and how awkward it would be to do that. To hobble my way onto in, and climb up. The gallery assistant would obviously run over and ask me to stop. How long would that take? Maybe they would just radio for help.

Sometimes I'd like to radio for help.

*static*

“I’ve got a headache and my nose is blocked, and I've not been feeling well and the light is dying, and i’ve not been food shopping, and i’ve not had a hug recently, and the fucking thing that I’m trying to do isn’t fucking vibing, you’re fucking with my chi.”

*static*

“That feels a bit better…….no wait, it doesn’t”

*static*

“They always say talking about it will make it feel better, but mostly it doesn’t”

*static*

“I’m a mental health first aider”

*static*

“They gave me training at work, any problems you got, come talk to me, suicidal feelings?”

—--------------------------------------------------

SCENE 4

Off White: (voice is croaky) Water? I need water, Please?

Drunken Sailor: (In The Simpsons Sea Captain voice) Ahoy mateys, there not be a drop spare here.

Gallery Assistant: AUDIENCES ARE REMINDED THAT LIQUIDS ARE NOT ALLOWED IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE.

Off White: More croaky groaning sounds.

Discs in Echelon: I can’t risk getting tarnished, I must agree, no water, it's in my contract.

Someone: You’ve got a box tho. None of us have got a box. Looks a bit weird tbh.

Discs in Echelon: Of course I’ve got a box. You’re always going on about the box. I’m the oldest one here, I need some extra support, it's not safe for me.

Someone: I’m just saying, it throws off the whole feng shui. The box makes you take up three times as much space.

Discs in Echelon: What if someone touches me?

Someone: None of us are getting touched.

A visitor: Like how the booklet says that the Kira Freije face moulds won’t age like the real faces they are based on. But that’s only because we’ll think the sculpture is more special when it gets old and put it in a box to make sure nothing happens to it.

Discs in Echelon: Jesse Darling’s got a box.

Virgin Variations: I AM a box ffs.

Off White: Stop arguing, I need help, I’m so thirsty.

Someone: It’s okay, Nicole Wermers is coming later.

Discs in Echelon: I’m leaving then.

—----------------------------------------

Peekaboo!

There’s a head in there.

That face is mashed up.

My warm woven seed pod womb shows you my face, nice hole to peer through.

—--------------------------------------------------

Hide and reveal, slap and tickle. Is that a fake rose or are you just pleased to see me?

—--------------------------------------------------

SCENE 5

Walks over to ‘Carcass, Float and Residual Glare I from the series Singed Lids’ by Rebecca Ackroyd. “All that was left of flight 275 to LAX”

—--------------------------------------------------

SCENE 6

Bobby: Bleep bloop bloop bleep

Richard Deacon: Who the fuck-

Bobby: Bobby, 2023, mixed materials, collaborative artists

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