Squids, tabernacles, and art inside a Dalston shipping container. Sounds intriguing...
Squids are funny creatures. Large ones terrify mariners on precarious ships in long poems, whilst small ones taste delicious when battered, fried and served up in a Mare Street Vietnamese. But we're pretty certain we've never seen any kind of squid – whether large and frightening or starter-sized and zingy – inside a tabernacle. It seems an unlikely pairing, right?
Well, apparently not. For Squid & Tabernacle is an itinerant contemporary art project that was founded in 2008 by Hanna Sorrell and George Major. Every now and again they pop up somewhere new with an innovative exhibition in an usual space. So this April, for example, they're putting on a solo show for London-based sculptor Rachel Price inside a shipping container at Hartwell Street in Dalston. A shipping container? It's a far cry from Cork Street, that's for sure.
As Hanna explains, “we want to promote bold interventions and installations in unusual or unexpected settings.” And certainly a shipping container is unexpected, but not simply arbitrary: “we always look to find spaces that are relevant to the artist’s practice,” Hanna continues. “We didn’t want to take up a permanent space because we thought it would be far more interesting and challenging, both for us and the artists, to show work that has been produced specifically in relation to its location.”
Understandably they're rather excited about the new space, and we're particularly looking forward to the Rachel Price show in April. “We're attracted to working with artists,” Hanna says, “whose practice has a strong sense of conceptual process,” and this is certainly the case with Price. Her work explores the occasionally fertile, often fraught relationship between image and object. Her site-specific installation for Squid & Tabernacle incorporates unusual materials – dust sheets, timber, cement and foam have all featured in past works – to question one's sense of perception, with both sincerity and wit.
So if you're a fan of the unusual, the challenging, the unlikely and the entertaining, then this April we recommend you spend an hour or two looking at art inside a shipping container in Dalston. There are weirder things that could happen: squids in tabernacles, for example.
Rachel Price - Planning Permission is at Squid & Tabernacle, Hartwell Street Dalston from 2nd-23rd April 2010. www.squidandtabernacle.com
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