For this year’s Platform Projects @ Art Athina, LUBOMIROV-EASTON has invited a large number of international artists to send a letter to Greece. The only restriction on artwork is that it must fit inside an A5 envelope – a size which represents a single fold in the standard A4 letter size. Rooted in a tradition of postcard shows, such as the annual ‘Secrets’ at the Royal College, as well as referencing mail art and the New York Correspondence School, this format has the advantage not only of simplifying freight, but crucially of allowing a larger number of artists to be shown together. Thus the show is conceived as a kind of communal artwork, a joint letter from one community of artists to another, to be assembled on site from hundreds of individual pieces. It is the nature of Platform Projects, as a gathering of international artist-led organisations, which are each other’s audience as much as the visitors to the fair, that makes this form of address to other artist communities possible.
The participating artists have complete freedom to interpret the 148×210 mm envelope space and there are no restrictions made on contents: whether the work is a postcard, a letter, or poster; whether painting, drawing, or sculpture; any object is allowed, including digital media such as a CD, DVD, or memory stick, or anything else that can be mailed and survive the postal journey there and back. There are no thematic restrictions either, and the resulting collection is intended as a broad snapshot of practices and ideas. It is then the role of the curator and the viewer to search out signs of a common language, which may perhaps exist, or be perceived to exist.
The artists are, however, invited to consider the wider implications of the A5 format, such as for example its geometric properties, its history, its ubiquitous circulation. The A0 to A10 series of paper sizes have been used as an international standard throughout Europe and most of the world for nearly a hundred years. They were invented by a German scientist in the 18th century and first used officially in France during the Revolution. Their especial genius is the simple and elegant concept of creating a rectangle which preserves its width-to-length ratio when folded in half. For this to work, it can be shown that the sides of consecutive A sizes must be reduced by roughly 29% ( a scale factor of 1/√2 ). The largest size in the series, A0, has an area of 1m^2, and this basic unit of scientific measure is folded in half up to 10 times to create all the other sizes.
Because every fold doubles the number of sheets, a single square meter can accommodate up to 32 A5 sheets. Hence the standard walls in Platform Projects give LUBOMIROV-EASTON ample scope to represent a significant range of artists at the fair.
Artists:
Bonita Alice, Brandon Alvendia, Ralph Anderson, William Angus-Hughes, Rachel Ara, Akiko Ban, David J Batchelor, Richard Bateman, Michael Boffey, Juan Bolivar, Vivienne Boucherat, Jane Boyer, Joanna Brinton, Samuel Capps, Thomas C. Chung, Carlos Correia, Cecilia Costa, Deb Covell, Amelia Critchlow, John Crossley, Amy Cunningham, Karen David, Bella Easton, Liz Elton, Holly Frean, Cadi Froehlich, Mikey Georgeson, Henk Gieskens, Alison Gill, Alison Goodyear, Maria Gouveli, Fiona Grady, Oona Grimes, Seth Guy, Kirsty Harris, Chris Hawtin, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Brian D Hodgson, Phill Hopkins, Laura Hudson, Mandy Hudson, Hannah Hughes, Julian Hughes-Watts, Lisa Ivory, Karin Janssen, Evy Jokhova, Katherine Jones, Young Joo Kim, Tabitha Knight, Hiroe Komai, Maggie Learmonth, Maria Letsiou, Rachel Levitas, Katherine Lubar, Iavor Lubomirov, Lee Maelzer, Colin Maitland, Enzo Marra, Sam Marshall, Zoe Martin, Nigel Massey, Michael McNamara, Sam Mogelonsky, Satoshi Nakajima, Valeriya N-Georg, Sarah Pager, Seung Ah Paik, James Petrucci, Carolina Piteira, Gareth Proskourine-Barnett, Quinn and Harvey, Frances Richardson, Pippa Ridley, Greg Rook, Steve Rosenthal, Laura Smith, Elli Sou, Aaron Steed, Joseph Stokes, Dolly Thompsett, Albeiro Rojas Tomedes, Claude Vergez, Marianne Walker, Grant Watson, Alice Wilson, Dan Wray, Margita Yankova
For more info: http://www.lubomirov-easton.com/Art-Athina-2014