GROUPSHOW!

Mish Meijers

Opening 02.03.16 6-8pm
Artist Talks 24.03.16 6-7pm

GROUPSHOW! is a new investigation into developing platforms for non-linear and tangential practice. Created by artist Mish Meijers it supposes a fictional grouping of artists working on a common curatorial theme or concept. Meijers has both a solo and a collaborative practice, the latter being based around a fictional character called Henri Papin. For this reason GROUPSHOW! is not about the authentication of multiple fictional personas but rather an embracing of the material and energetic dynamism that is often present in a group show.

On first inspection and entry to a group show I have a tendency to surveil the exhibition as one complete installation, noting how the works are interacting and talking to each other on various levels. I think of the role and of the privilege of the overseer, the curator who corrals these unsuspecting works together into cohesion. Occasionally the curatorial voice is so strong/decisive/intuitive that the works resonate with a similar tone, as if they have at some stage shared a common material ancestry. Sometimes the works agitate against each other, which is even more compelling, particularly when imagining that the vision for the whole room has been developed by the singular perspective of one artist. I am particularly interested in the incompatible and dissenting voices within one’s art practice, and in exhibitions where the curated touch is ambiguous and personally invested.

Being multi-disciplinary in her approach to art-making and her fundamental career philosophy allows Meijers to manifest that singular overarching perspective while still maintaining a dynamism in the concepts, construction and arrangement of her objects and artworks. Her works come into being through rigorous and intuitive experimentation and are situated within this initial GROUPSHOW! context in order to offer the divergent voices of different media equal footing within the curatorial suggestion of protest. Protest in the broadest sense of the word, that which examines dissent in either overt or oblique manners –through more literal forms of text-based inclusion, or more subtle forms of material incompatibility.