Dan Rees
24 Jan - 07 Mar 2015
DAN REES
Stimulate Surprise
24 January - 7 March 2015
After six years at Kurfürstenstraße 156, we are pleased to announce the gallery’s expansion into a newly renovated, 130 m2 space opposite the existing gallery. Inaugurating Kurfürstenstraße 24/25 is a solo exhibition by Dan Rees titled Stimulate Surprise, which spans both the new and existing galleries.
PRESS RELEASE
The defenders of pasta are shackled by its ball and chain like convicted lifers or carry its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists.
-Marinetti, 'The Futurist Cookbook'
Stimulate Surprise, the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery, develops from Rees’ 2013 exhibition Kelp at the National Museum of Wales and draws together various strands of his ongoing research into the seaweed industry. The artist’s aims lie between posing a practical solution to pertinent questions concerning global food shortages and a utopian vision, where our overreliance on wheat and corn is replaced by a readily available resource that requires no land or fresh water to grow.
A 'presentation deck' commissioned by the artist displays a New York ad agency's rebranding of Welsh seaweed as the next must-have food in the United States. The imagery of the slideshow stands in contrast to a documentary video depicting the workings of a small seaweed farm in Vietnam, a country where this type of aquaculture has yet to establish itself on the international market.
The gallery becomes a site of distribution in the work Tri Tin, which takes its title from a seaweed company in the Khánh Hòa province of Vietnam specialising in the farming of a seaweed called Green Caviar. Not currently exported to Europe, the 500 boxes of Green Caviar on display in the gallery mark its introduction into a new market.
These various points of enquiry into the feasibility of an alternative food source are mediated by a continued sense of transnational trade via large advertising billboards imported by the artist from China. The blank billboards rotate on a timer, programmed to turn in a specific wave formation at various intervals, evoking both continuity and change, along with the potential of an untapped resource.
Stimulate Surprise
24 January - 7 March 2015
After six years at Kurfürstenstraße 156, we are pleased to announce the gallery’s expansion into a newly renovated, 130 m2 space opposite the existing gallery. Inaugurating Kurfürstenstraße 24/25 is a solo exhibition by Dan Rees titled Stimulate Surprise, which spans both the new and existing galleries.
PRESS RELEASE
The defenders of pasta are shackled by its ball and chain like convicted lifers or carry its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists.
-Marinetti, 'The Futurist Cookbook'
Stimulate Surprise, the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery, develops from Rees’ 2013 exhibition Kelp at the National Museum of Wales and draws together various strands of his ongoing research into the seaweed industry. The artist’s aims lie between posing a practical solution to pertinent questions concerning global food shortages and a utopian vision, where our overreliance on wheat and corn is replaced by a readily available resource that requires no land or fresh water to grow.
A 'presentation deck' commissioned by the artist displays a New York ad agency's rebranding of Welsh seaweed as the next must-have food in the United States. The imagery of the slideshow stands in contrast to a documentary video depicting the workings of a small seaweed farm in Vietnam, a country where this type of aquaculture has yet to establish itself on the international market.
The gallery becomes a site of distribution in the work Tri Tin, which takes its title from a seaweed company in the Khánh Hòa province of Vietnam specialising in the farming of a seaweed called Green Caviar. Not currently exported to Europe, the 500 boxes of Green Caviar on display in the gallery mark its introduction into a new market.
These various points of enquiry into the feasibility of an alternative food source are mediated by a continued sense of transnational trade via large advertising billboards imported by the artist from China. The blank billboards rotate on a timer, programmed to turn in a specific wave formation at various intervals, evoking both continuity and change, along with the potential of an untapped resource.