When
Gabriel Orozco famously re-created the
New York skyline with rubbish he found at the side of the road, he transformed perhaps the finest icon of
modernism-Manhattan, into a temporal and poetic intervention.
Island Within An Island is a work about how we inscribe the personal onto the collective. The gesture is a leitmotif for much of the work in
Legacy I, an open-air exhibition next to the Olympic site.
This first exhibition by L.I.U, presents 23 emerging and mid-career artists, and the work in the exhibition inverts the sensibility of the stadium shadowing it. There is a constant desire in Legacy I towards the hermetic, local and informal which sits in stark contrast to the universalist aims of much public sculpture. If we read the Olympic Stadium as a monument to one of New Labour's finest achievements, then much of the work in Legacy I suggests an alternate narrative. The artists deal with displacement (Charlotte Warne Thomas and Hannah Brown) and adopt strategies of camouflage (Jamie Partridge and Oliver Palmer). Much of the work is unified through a sense of concealment and dislocation.
Artists have always been adept at parasitizing development and re-engineering spaces of inactivity. As artists are pushed further afield, shows such as Legacy I alongside Hannah Barry's Bold Tendencies, suggest a model of establishing communities and platforms for emerging artists. Legacy I is a show about contrasting stories and like Orozco's intervention, it is an attempt to inscribe our personal histories onto the public and collective realm.
NB: runs till 05/12.