PERFORMANCE: Friday July 22 /  6-8.30pm

IMT Gallery/ Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ UK

In their new performance work, TWIST, 2011, Beech and Thomasson focus on the potential performed actions have in displaying meaning and communicating narratives. A Solo performer is observed and later joined by a small group in a movement-based presentation within the gallery space.  Meandering between Chiropractory, First Aid and Latin dance, and underscored with live sound construction, Twist presents movement as a form of therapeutic release, a strategy that can be learnt through instruction and performed in the safety of one another’s company.

Two new video works RETREAT (Lucy Beech 2011) and ESCAPE (Edward Thomasson 2011) will be screened as part of the exhibition at IMT alongside this new collaborative performance work.

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson – One Another’s Company
23rd July – 21st August 2011

Private view: Friday 22nd July 6:00 – 9:00pm

Performance: Friday 22nd July 8.15pm

Late opening: Thursday 4th August until 9:00pm

IMT Gallery is pleased to present One Another’s Company, London based artists Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson’s first collaborative exhibition of film and performance work in the UK. The show brings together new works by the artists who each have an individual art making practice and frequently work in coalition to produce live performance based works. For their exhibition at IMT Gallery, Beech and Thomasson will be showing two new narrative films conceived individually, as well as a performance piece devised in collaboration. Presented together, both the performance piece and the films investigate how the artists’ collaborative concerns manifest and inform their individual work. Employing strategies of repertoire theatre in their mode of production, both Retreat, 2011, Lucy Beech and Escape, 2011, Edward Thomasson consider and examine spectatorship and representation in everyday life with particular emphasis on the live and the rehearsed, performed and observed.

Lucy Beech’s Retreat, 2011, records a group of women in a marquee as they make negative impressions of domestic objects. As the objects begin to take form, dramatic tension rises and metaphorical potentials in form, surface and materials ensue. As the women become embroiled in their poetic game, the activity reveals itself as a elaborate exercise in collective catharsis while possible narratives weave in and out of focus resisting any fixed manifestation.

Edward Thomasson’s Escape, 2011 brings together a number of inter-linked scenarios that centre on strategies for personal change. Performed in a therapy centre in rooms and makeshift sets, the film utilises a variety of storytelling devices in its presentation of characters constructing their own escape routes. In one scenario, a therapist attends an evening group in an attempt to lose herself without leaving the confines of the building. In another, a young woman in a cellar slowly works away at the wall to create a tunnel through which to escape. Constructed around text and coming together in a climactic musical sequence, Escape, 2011, comments more broadly on moving image’s close relationship with escapism.

Collaboratively Beech and Thomasson’s practice recognises the limitless possibility and potential in the unsettling distance between the audience and ‘stage’. They utilise repetitive body based movement and employ the rhetoric of theatre as a strategy to intensify this gap rendering the audience unable to repose into one mode of experience. in their new performance work, Twist, 2011, Beech and Thomasson focus on the potential performed actions have in displaying meaning and communicating narratives. A Solo performer is observed and later joined by a small group in a movement-based presentation within the gallery space. Meandering between Chiropractic, First Aid and Latin dance, and underscored with live sound construction, Twist presents movement as a form of therapeutic release, a strategy that can be learnt through instruction and performed in the safety of one another’s company.

Beech and Thomasson’s recent collaborations include: 7 Year Itch, More Soup and Tart, Barbican Theatre, London; Holding it Together, Night and Day, Modern Art Oxford; The Cigarette Game, Testing Ground:
Live, Zabludowicz Collection, London and in Making Mistakes at Paradise Row, London.

Running concurrently with the exhibition will be a series of film screenings by other artists also concerned with investigating collaboration within their practice.

Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson – One Another’s Company is an exhibition made by Hana Noorali and supported by the Arts Council England.
investigating collaboration within their practice.
www.lucybeech.com
www.edwardthomasson.com