Opening tomorrow in South London, tomorrow will problably be today before this goes up and as the mighty Heep once sang, today is only
Yesterday’s tomorrow.. And so opening today, Wednesday April 18th, renowned artist Sam Cottington – known for his dynamic painting, sculpture, video and installation works – will be presenting his all-new exhibition BLANKS. The show runs from 18^th until 28^th April at London Performance Studios. “A major new commission, BLANKS explores where the languages of sculpture and performance intertwine, using ideas around readymades and live theatre to confront how we interact with every-day objects and art objects”.

Here’s the Studio’s own statement:

London Performance Studios is pleased to present BLANKS, a major new commission by Associate Artist Sam Cottington, in which the languages of sculpture and performance are brought into counterpoint with the apparatus of the exhibition and the theatre. BLANKS can be understood as an exhibition in a series of acts—a series of actions, or sleights of hand by the artist—as well as a piece of theatre, in which objects and staging act as stand-ins for various modes of discursive production and the publics that such discourse might bring to life. 

First, Cottington seems to present the viewer with an enumeration of readymades. However, as the viewer approaches these found objects for a second look one, and then another, of a series of found telephones begins to ring. The suite of assemblages is now an environment-cum-scenography for four plays written by the artist, and performed by actors somewhere on the other end of the line. 

Performed live over the phone, each play perverts the status of the objects staged for exhibition by inviting listeners to engage with a series of unclear relationships and scenarios, invoked and mediated by contemporary communication technology.

As sculpture becomes prop, viewer becomes audience, and exhibition becomes stage, Cottington explores what critic Sianne Ngai has called the ‘gimmicks of production’: those moments when an object or person performs too much or too little—when it’s too easy, undeserving of praise or overly produced, trying too hard, camp—and how in those moments, the sublimated labour in everyday judgements of taste or aesthetic value are revealed. In setting the sculpture within the language of the readymade and materiality of the assemblage, and against the made reality of the theatre—sculptural realism against theatrical melodrama—BLANKS asks us to deconstruct how the discursive lines of aesthetic acceptability, propriety, decency, and criticality are shored up by a policing of the suspension of disbelief, in whatever genre of ‘real life’ scenario they are encountered. 

Scripts from the four plays presented in BLANKS are collected in new publication Phone Plays, which accompanies the exhibition. This is the first publication in Scores, a new imprint co-commissioned by Montez Press and London Performance Studios, that publishes scripts and performance texts by artists, theatre-makers and performance-makers working between the visual and theatrical arts.

This exhibition is organised by Sam Cottington, as part of the Associate Artists Programme.

About

Sam Cottington (he/him) is an artist and writer based between London and Frankfurt. His written work takes form as plays, novellas and short stories and his artistic work spans painting, sculpture, video and installation. He studied Art and Art History at Goldsmiths University in London and is currently studying Fine Art at Städelschule in Frankfurt. His first novella people person was published by JOAN in 2023. Recent exhibitions included zaza’, Milan (2023), Ginny on Frederick, London (2022) and Yaby, Madrid (2020).

Project

As an associate, Cottington will research and develop BLANKS, an installation that brings together theatre, sculpture and performance to stage four one-act plays, along with other new scripts for presentation throughout 2024–2025.

London Performance Studios is found at the Penarth Centre, Penarth Street, London, SE15 1TR. More details here

There’s a great interview with Sam on the LPS Instagram page that trells you more

Previous work