Designs Towards a Meeting Place for Future Events of Universal Truth

Preview: Wednesday, 16 January 2013, 6:30 - 8:30PM

Exhibition Run: 17 January – 17 February 2013

Roman Vasseur installs a temporary interior architecture that privileges the ‘meeting’ as performance and as art — an art that seeks an epic address.

The installation’s design is informed by a correspondence between Vasseur and Christopher Gibbs, the famous aesthete and set designer for cult 1968 film Performance. Gibbs was asked to reflect on the hermetic spaces of the film that suggested an erotic nucleus to both the counter-culture that the film captured, and the private interests of that time which sought to reformulate their power in the shifting economies and class structures of the late sixties.

Fragments of rituals and spaces of commune arrive with the viewer as both background and as a form of accelerated archeology. The salon, the gallery and the executive meeting room are collapsed together in the construction of a space where ideas, as art, seek ascendancy, dispersal and sovereignty. Vasseur delivers political material within the exhibition as a fiction — dormant artifacts or sculptures around which publics are manufactured and assembled 

The exhibition extends into the offices of Cubitt where a text painting is installed as a mantra for the host organisation’s members and administration.

Roman Vasseur lives and works in London. Vasseur acted as Lead Artist for Harlow New Town between 2008-2011, where he was asked to consider the art and architecture principles of the town’s original masterplan during a period of reassessment and regeneration. Previous solo exhibitions include Black Propaganda at Melancholy Ranch, aired daily on local television to the High Desert communities of the Morongo Basin, California (2005); Murder Considered As a Fine Art: The Ritualised Death of the International Mural Artist, Jeffrey Charles Gallery, London (2004); 500 Pounds of Common Earth, 1 Metre Cubed, Transylvania to Los Angeles, Austrian Cultural Foundation, London; Project Gallery, Dublin; RAID Projects, Los Angeles; and the Centre for Land Use Interpretation, Mojave Desert (all 2000).

Roman Vasseur’s exhbition is supported by Arts Council England and Outset Contemporary Art Fund.