Naming Rights at Thomas Dane Gallery

To produce the exhibition Naming Rights at Thomas Dane Gallery, the arcane rules of an artists run project space are displaced into the context of a West End commercial gallery. The exhibition will process these seemingly conflicting material systems, resolving into a presentation of works.

For the first three weeks of the exhibition, each artist's works will be shown as a solo presentation in the main exhibition space for a little more than one day each in turn. Then on the 12th of September, all the works will return together, re-placed to their ‘original position’. Naming Rights’ office and studio will use the rear gallery as a publicly accessible working space, and any works not currently on display will be kept in an open storeroom between the galleries.

The exhibition features works whose materiality or concepts are related explicitly to the artists’ life. An example of this is the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas and its intricate tie to the concept of ‘Autoconstrucción’; an opportunistic and resourceful strategy that seeks to reuse, repair and appropriate material for the construction of buildings, usually in deprived urban areas with limited resources. Having grown up in Mexico City, surrounded by these constructs, Cruzvillegas’ art has become permeated with this ideology, which now defines his creative practice.

The selection principle for all works in the show introduces a specific enquiry: How does the content or material, which is ‘not art’, become part of an artwork? The methods and ways of presenting this condition might allow us to think about the path of art's accretion. Their examination might allow us to determine what is really left from their origins and their partial or complete idiosyncrasies.