When Contents Become Form

Arbeit Gallery is proud to present When Contents Become Form, by the artist Jeannie Driver. The exhibition comprises of a hanging sculpture entitled White3 and six wall-based works. The works are derived from the artists’ experience of visiting galleries in the role of audience. Driver explores the dialogue around the context, rules and language of viewing artworks in a gallery space.

White3, a sculptural installation constructed from gallery press releases fed through a security level two shredder invites the viewer to walk around and experience the illusion of solidity, fragmentation, focus and unfocused vision. The context of the material, in both its content and materiality, and the resulting form of the installation is central to the work and its relationship to ideas of the gallery as a ‘white cube’.

Through the deconstruction and reconstruction of (the form of) the press releases they lose what authority they once held; as code breakers, instructions, as tools of enculturation. The work homogenises the contents and is re-presented in a form that captures its original purpose and relationship with the creator. The artwork invites the viewer to look, see and experience rather than read.

Whereas White3 is Driver’s personal response to the written codes of a gallery, an attempt at changing a person’s thought or behaviour, the wall pieces are a more direct confrontation with the politics and behaviour of gallery and exhibition spaces. The part-shredded, part-remaining photographs are layered and represented on one plane, constructed from documentary photographs taken in galleries across regions and countries.

Whilst the title When Contents Become Form, can be taken literally, it also refers to an exhibition originally presented in 1969, “Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form”, and represented in 2013 as “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013”, by The Fondazione Prada at Ca' Corner della Regina, Venice, 2013. Originally curated by Harold Szeemann, the exhibition explored themes of curatorship and relationship between the artworks, looking to eliminate the need for outside context.

“The exhibition became a dialectical field of encounter between the individual artists and the curator, between the event and the architecture: a place where the works formed links with each other, in a kind of continuously-evolving organic weave.”
Fondazione Prada website