‘Wedding Crashers’ at The Adelaide Salon
- davidryan97
- Apr 28
- 4 min read
The Adelaide Salon in conjunction with curators Bill Redshaw and Ben Coleman presents:
‘Wedding Crashers’
Exhibition runs: 3-5th & 10-11th May
PV: 3rd of May
Address: 27 Adelaide Crescent, BN3 2JH
This space, reminiscent of a wedding cake’s elaborate frosting through Regency detailing,
champions emerging artists with ambitious material based pieces.
Wedding Crashers, subverts typical presentation in the form of covered monuments,
composed from the residing furniture in the Salon, as if set for a fictitious theatrical wedding.
Through which a question is posed: How may a wedding, comprised through ceremony or
reception, be similar to an exhibition in its’ own construction and transfiguration of reality?
Making use of one uniform element, white cloth disguises the lived home and further
resembles some kind of strange colourful dinner party. These ‘ghost’ sheets remind us of
preparatory measures used to protect furniture during renovation work. A spring clean. A
museum in the works.
This ‘masking’ of the home says something about our freedom throughout the Artist’s Open
Houses festival, to snoop and trespass within the alternative exhibition format of others’
homes. One of the interesting things about this ‘domestic voyeurism’ is to honour and
celebrate indoor spaces for artistic production and exhibition, as well as our human interest to
pry and visit unusual, typically private, spaces.
The artists featured in the show predominantly use materials in their work that reflect those
common to a wedding, such as paper and fabric. Our curation of these materials and objects,
frames the artist’s work as marital offerings and ‘wedding favours’; or solemn ‘traces’ of their
party attendance? The furniture monuments act as vessels, offering a glimpse into the artist’s
individual psyche and process, and our ‘match-made’ connections between different artists.
The role of our curatorial choice here, is for the item of furniture to highlight its’ ‘bodily
space’ - capturing a sense of humanness in the unhuman. Transformed into absence guests
and isolated bodies for display, the artworks atop these platforms are personified objects
reflecting their parent/partner artist themselves as guests at a wedding. Members of a group
show, within the visual metaphor of a ginormous Georgian wedding cake, they become
ingredients. The suggestion of our performed wedding are reflected in some of the artworks:
abandoned clothes, propped canes, ginormous veils, skeletal dress maquette bodices. This
designed strike in juxtaposition between ‘absence’ and ‘presence’, receives and involves an
audience into the visual comedy of an unwanted guest. Or rather, the implied position you’re
in as viewers and visitors…it’s you the ‘Crashers’! Asking…
Who lives in this house?
Where have all the wedding guests gone?
Discarded, miscellaneous jumpers.
Untouched cake.
Far thrown veils and scattered paper character confetti.
Set design cut outs, brain stormed across the mirror.
Ellie Thompsons’ bubble gum toned soft toy pterodactyl, ‘Wimpy’, remains in attendance.
Jeering congratulations toward the wedded. Limp and abandoned like the lost toy of a child.
Paintings of uncanny seahorses sit along the mantelpiece as if they’re family photographs, or
Perdita Sinclair’s own AI generated animal fleet, heading the newlyweds’ carriage.
These artworks intrigue you and wink back like guests themselves, inviting themes of
transmogrification and personal intimacies. Similarly, these are purposefully domestic,
pointed materials. Installations have a presence that disrupt and draws you directly to the
candid domestic space, and what we may inherit and inter-connect through daily
consumption and collection.
Ellie Briffitt’s ‘Nans Bara Brith’ recipe, blown up to an almighty pantomime scale - no less
crocheted - provides a feeling of nostalgia but also of growth and flourishing.
These performative artefacts from our everyday, flung on the floor discarded clothing, tipped
out laundry and tripped over loose rolls of wallpaper, they pull your experience toward the
unwanted details of ‘homes-stuff’ or personal trinkets that would usually be hidden out of
sight to aid Artist’s Open Houses event access.
We live with these materials.
And there within, connect with those more intangible themes and ideas through the practices
of an artist. Alexander Ardisson’s boot-legged aesthetic jumpers are aimed as a vehicle
enabling Alex to expand upon his thoughts around cyclical trash and treasure relationships
through global trade, travel, and craft.
Envisioned forms that would otherwise be untraceable become perceivable through Zizi Liu’s
work, and we connect and combine with the fragility of those tube forms, reminiscent of the
innards of the body, pools of blood or water. Organic plant growths.
The artworks inhabiting the space look perhaps garish amongst the Georgian pastel chroma,
furthering this comically explosive theme surrounding the exhibition. A historic unusual
space, filled with bold new work, creates an amusing visual symmetry to crashing a wedding!
We want the conceptual components and materials of a wedding to be highlighted in the
event and matrimonial happening of a visited exhibition, and play upon the artistic ‘reception’
element showcased through the Artist Open Houses festival. The togetherness in birth and
creative matrimony between Artist-Material-Idea and Production. Marriage as a
verb. What's
particularly exciting is getting artworks together which create something new. Placing shapes,
colours, themes and ideas together in harmony and juxtaposition to create visual
conversations.
These elemental threads between works have helped us as curators reposition and ‘prop-up’
how we address this work within a young emerging artist scene. Forming supportive
relationships together, from different artists and artworks spatially curated into their own
couplets. Visual gags. ‘Wedded’ or ‘Match-made’ dialogues. This experimental result with the
artists attempts to ‘marry’ elements together materially, and to ‘marry’ different practices
together within one environment and group show. Activated upon your intrusion.
Venue: 10
27 Adelaide Cres, Brighton and Hove, Hove, Brighton and Hove BN3 2JH, UK
