The Listeners is an installation by artists Joe Davies and Grace Black.
Opening event: Friday 13th Septemer, 6pm-9pm
Closing event with performances and other live acts: Friday 27th September
Exhibition runs 14th September — 27th September [open to the public Tues-Sat, 12pm-6pm]
Some parts are easier to understand than others. There’s bits of it we’ll never know for certain just what they mean. It’s that we don’t have the picture any more, not the light but the sound — and The Listeners, listening.
The Listeners is an installation by artists Joe Davies and Grace Black. It misinterprets a set of functional objects, a number of disused and degraded professional stage lights which Joe collected from a lock-up in Fakenham, Norfolk. In their life, these lights were used to provide dramatic, moody, sublime atmospheres of colour suspended in smoke at The Waterfront, a music venue and club run by a student union in Norwich. In The Listeners, Grace and Joe have amplified the internal mechanisms of the largely-defunct lights. Switched on, all in their varying flickering states of disfunction, they create a constantly changing mechanical noise work, an intense, industrial droning, an electric, detailed whirring or humming. Grace and Joe will also be working on installing material from parts of The Horse Hospital not normally on view to audiences during shows or gigs, a gentle nod to the impending closure of the space after 31 years of twinned grandeur and decay, serving DIY culture in London.
The Listeners runs from the 13th of September to the 21st of September. There will be an opening event on Friday the 13th of September, and a closing event on Friday the 27th of September with performances by Adam Gallagher, Go Sing, Mataio Austin Dean, Euan Francis Gubbins, and East Anglia Records.
Grace Black is an artist who makes sculpture, performance and music. Often this is as a part of duo Mosquito Farm who regularly perform across DIY venues in London and beyond.
Joe Davies’ practice involves collecting, recording and arranging material and objects resulting in combinations of the given and the made which sit somewhere between archeological reconstruction and fictional tableaux.
Grace and Joe have worked together in a number of collaborations involving many artists and performers, but this is the first time they have worked together in this way. Here they are elaborating on a shared habit of interpreting collections of objects and images through their sculptural and sound art practices.