Collaboration with Steven Rendall. 2023. Pencil, acrylic, gouache, 200cm lanyard chain, wood, Lego. 148 x 137cm
Steven Rendall with
Danica Chappell
Andrea Eckersley
Michael Graeve
Bryan Spier
ScreenChainGridShelf… notes:
Notes, fragments, remains, leftovers, lists, echoes...
This exhibition expands upon Steven’s prior collaborative experiments by presenting existing and newly formed combinations and arrangements.
Each collaborative structure materialises conversations between Steven and one of the other artists.
Materials & processes discussed and experimented with include pragmatism; humour; jute; parallelograms; dead drops; assisted scanners; spray-painting; red lines; darkrooms; writing; linen; bubble wrap; printouts; dogs (images of); dismantled flatscreens; Sony Trinitron monitors; Bayonet Neill-Concelman Connectors; holes; chains; grids; shelves, excess, shapes...
Some months ago, Steven received an email from Claudia Mejia - “I write to extend an invitation for you to exhibit at the gallery.” There wasn’t much more information – a refreshing absence of theme, demands, conditions etc. Simply an ‘extended invitation’. In the interests of this generosity Steven extended the invitation to four other artists. To make things more interesting/generous Steven proposed that each of these four invitees would make collaborative works with Steven. There were some histories of practice to build this idea upon.
The Steven and Bryan collaborative entity, half remembered as Rendall&Spier, has had an extensive array of collaborative exhibitions that includes attempting to contact the dead amongst its highlights (How the Dead Live at Conical in 2009). For the Mejia exhibition Rendall&Spier took turns responding to each other’s painted shapes. They utilised a ‘dead drop’ method where a rolled canvas was stashed in a pre-arranged hidden location after each of them had made their separate painted interventions/responses. There were occasional text messages & even more occasional conversations when Bryan and Steven managed to be in the same place at the same time.
Andrea and Steven have exhibited several collaborative works exploring the material intersections of fashion and painting in ARI and commercial gallery contexts. In this instantiation, they have reversed and warped their usual order of making, arriving with a veil of metal chains intersecting with painting. The curtain of chain isolate and divide the spatial planes of the painting to be inclusive of the pigment on the wall, the light projecting through the veil and the subsequent shadow. It is not about an illusion of depth rather it is about where the surface is.
Throughout the 2020/21 lockdowns Michael and Steven collaboratively assembled several thousand words of essays, articles, and experimental texts under the working name of SRMG. Some of these were submitted to academic journals. None were accepted. They have used these words as raw material for exhibition proposals – this has been a more successful tactic/strategy. This Mejia collaboration is the first of three Graeve and Rendall collaborative projects. It will be followed by exhibitions at Five Walls and Blindside later in 2023.
Danica and Steven have been obsessing about screens and their excesses for a while. Various scavenged dismantled flatscreens and conversations have existed between their respective studio spaces. More recently the collaboration has existed as holes drilled into these dismantled flatscreens. These adjusted glass plates have been subjected to darkroom experiments. They have also been scanned using a modified scavenged scanner. This scanning process was video recorded. This led to a proliferation of Sony Trinitron monitors stacked up in the studio kitchen... We measure screens on the diagonal.