Ludovica Gioscia & Karen Tang Residency

Karen Tang and Ludovica Gioscia will be collaborating on an interior environment likely to induce migraine and nausea in a design-purist and vertigo in the casual visitor. The artists will create a living graveyard of styles, fashions and trends; a magpie’s nest where design imagery will battle for prominence across every surface in a primal struggle. The gallery will be the arena for this gladiatorial combat of temporary alliances and clashes of culture, generation, and colour. The space will become an all-consuming landscape of convulsive beauty inhabited by flat-pack furniture turned feral and liberated from its domestic function. It will be a wild place, a lawless jungle of raging patterns and special affects punning with two and three dimensionality, perverting the language of the museum display, the film set and the games arcade. Gioscia and Tang’s psychedelic collaborative design-crimewave is fuelled by their overlapping concerns with the evolution and reinterpretation of design styles at a time when ‘to photoshop’ is a verb in common usage. Their orgy of teeming exteriors, all equivalent, prompts us to consider the way our amnesiac, amoral culture endlessly recycles imagery freed of its ideological commitment, recognisable but free-floating and context-less. The market demands of globalisation foster a cross-breeding of vernacular styles with international branding.

AM