15 artists, architects, designers, poets and writers interpret the potential of a minute
About a Minute is the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole, a new project space in Hoxton founded by aberrant architecture and Beatrice Galilee. For their first show, The Gopher Hole invited carefully chosen conceptual artists, architects, designers, poets and writers to respond to a premise – the idea that today, a minute is all we seem to have.
Increasingly hyperactive consumption of data, information and images has trained the brains of a generation to multi-task, skim, tweet, comment and status-update, but has eliminated the notion of patience or pause. The sheer volume of things available at the touch of a button or swipe of a finger has lead to a saturation point, where boredom and irritation arrives sooner than we may like to admit. Galleries are easy victims of the phenomenon. Visitors may spend a few moments to asorb an artwork, half-read a caption and move on. This leaves both curators and artists in a conundrum. How does one respond to the knowledge that no more than a minute may be spent with a painstakingly crafted exhibit? After all, it can take less than a minute for everything in the world to change.
Participants: Rachel Armstrong, Shumon Basar, Diane Cochrane, Economy, Glowacka Rennie & Robin Dutson, The Go West Project, Elaine W. Ho, Sam Jacob, Christian Kerrigan, Pedro Gadhano, Ralf Pflugfelder, Postworks, Jon Stone, Sunday Collective, Luke Wright
My contribution is 'Staring Into Space', a collection of six poems written to reflect the content and composition of about a month's worth of daydreams I noted down (or recorded on a dictaphone). Daydreaming can do strange things with time, including compressing it so that you conduct an entire fantasy narrative in the space of a minute or so. Visitors are invited to stand and daydream themselves, then record their daydreams in a book provided.
My favourites among the other pieces include a collection of 'translated' chairs (the originals were described using a minute's worth of words and the descriptions then used by architects as the basis for a new design) and a layered picture which visitors are invited to tear a piece from, causing a gradual decay over the course of the exhibition.
It's running from now until early February on Saturdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, at The Gopher Hole, which is downstairs at El Paso restaurant near the corner of Old Street and Curtain Road. Nearest tubes are Old Street and Liverpool Street. Please go and have a look round!
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