‘Wedding Crashers’ at The Adelaide Salon

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

The Adelaide Salon

27 Adelaide Cres, Brighton and Hove, Hove, Brighton and Hove BN3 2JH, UK

https://www.panzorge.co/theadelaidesalon/exhibitions