Memento Park

Solo exhibition, touring to Eastside Projects (Birmingham, Nov 2010 - Jan 2010), Cornerhouse (Manchester, Feb - April 2011), mima (Middlesbrough, April - July 2011). The exhibition offered a survey of ten years of the artist's practice and included a major new video commission, entitled 'Memento Park'.

Exhibition press release:
Eastside Projects proudly presents the debut of Memento Park, a major touring solo show by Carey Young commissioned in conjunction with Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough. A new video commission, Memento Park (2010), is central to the exhibition, which surveys a decade of the artist’s practice, including a number of key video works and recent photographic and text works.

Carey Young’s internationally renowned work focuses on the interconnections between economic systems, legal language and contemporary culture. Using a variety of media and settings she often uses found tools, language and training processes from the worlds of the multinational corporation and global law firm, altering them to create fictional and absurd scenarios which explore notions of performance, autonomy, criticality and imagination. Positioning herself as an insider to these predominant systems, she takes a stance between complicity and resistance as she criticizes them playfully through the use of their own methods and language.

Key to the exhibition, Memento Park was shot in a statue park in Budapest containing a large collection of monumental, socialist realist Soviet statues in poses of ‘suspended animation’. We see the figures surrounded by bustling contemporary life passing by outside the park, which undercuts the statues' historical importance and impressive physical impact by giving them a provisional, peripheral context reminiscent of the works of the late post-minimal artist Robert Smithson. Nevertheless, the seductive lushness of the surrounding greenery, shot mainly at the beginning and end of the day, gives these icons of propaganda a strange and beautiful serenity, as if we are witnessing the dusk and dawn of an idyll. This subtle and nuanced new work expands and laterally shifts the focus of Young’s ongoing interests in performance, politics and rhetoric.

Many of the recent works have not been seen in the UK before, including a new image from the artist’s Redshift series (2010), a series of cameraless photographs created in the darkroom by exposing light through translucent meteorite fragments as if they were photographic negatives, presented with a text relating to experimental ideas in copyright, and its relation to time and the distribution of images; and Obsidian Contract (2010), a legal text proposing the exhibition space as a new area of publicly-owned land via a reversed text reflected in a black mirror, a device which has a long tradition within witchcraft and the occult in many cultures, and is also associated with the Romantic landscape tradition in painting.

Eastside Projects has been altered to form three cinema rooms housing the videos Memento Park (2010), Uncertain Contract (2009) and Product Recall (2007). In Uncertain Contract, we see an actor interpret a script composed of legal terms from a commercial contract, the white backdrop of his rehearsal space referencing the 'white cube' of the gallery as well as the appearance of contractual documents. The specific terms of the contract have been omitted, leading to an 'uncertain' contract in which the meaning is open to interpretation.

For Product Recall, we see Carey Young undergoing a psychoanalysis session in which she is asked to remember a series of advertising slogans belonging to global companies, all whom are active as art sponsors and which brand themselves around ‘imagination’ or ‘inspiration’. It remains ambiguous whether the point of the exercise is for the artist to remember the slogans, or to forget them.

The rooms reform gallery space through a sequence of finished and unclad stud walls providing spaces for monitor based video works Terms & Conditions (2004), I am a Revolutionary (2001), and Everything You’ve Heard is Wrong (1999) and works from the photographic series Body Techniques (2007). Terms and Conditions is a short video that features a female presenter speaking to camera in a welcoming tone whilst standing in an idyllic agricultural landscape. Her speech appears to discuss the ‘site’ but the text is actually a composite of disclaimers from corporate websites, within the rural setting, the speech seems both absurd and curiously apt.

I am a Revolutionary sees the artist within the stage-like environment of an empty office space, undergoing a presentation skills training session with her own personal trainer. Together they work hard at perfecting a line from what appears to be a larger speech—"I am a revolutionary"—words which could equally come from heroic 'business leadership' rhetoric as from the words of political or anti-globalisation agitators.

Everything You’ve Heard is Wrong is a video of a performance held at Speakers' Corner, London, in which Young, dressed in a smart business suit, delivers a skills workshop on successful corporate-style communication in the midst of the traditional Sunday mayhem of speakers and onlookers.

Body Techniques is a new series of eight photographs that considers the interrelationships between art and globalized commerce. The title of the series refers to a phrase originally coined by Marcel Mauss and developed by Pierre Bourdieu as habitus, which describes how an operational context or behavior can be affected by institutions or ideologies. Set in the vast building sites of Dubai and Sharjah’s futuristic corporate landscape, the series sees the artist alone and dressed in a suit, reworking some of the classic performance-based works associated with Conceptual art, including pieces by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim and Valie Export. In recasting earlier works centered around the physicality of the body in time and space, it is ambiguous whether the artist is molding herself to the landscape or exploring ways of resisting it.

Three further text works complete the exhibition, including Cautionary Statement (2007), a text piece based on 'forward looking statements', a type of corporate disclaimer allowing firms to discuss the future whilst not being held to account if such statements do not come to pass; and a new version of Inventory (2007), which declares the current total value of the chemical elements that make up the artist’s body on the exterior billboard of Eastside Projects.

A new major monographic publication will accompany the exhibition, with texts by Jennifer Allen, Raimundas Malasauskas and Jill Magid and Carey Young. Memento Park tours to Cornerhouse, Manchester (4 Feb – 20 March 2011) and mima, Middlesbrough (31 March – 10 July 2011). Each venue will present a different selection of works by the artist, allowing a variety of themes to emerge across her diverse and ambitious practice.

Research Profile:

Carey Young is a Senior Lecturer in Photography in the Faculty of Media at LCC. Having completed an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 1997, her artistic work employs a variety of media, including photography, video, text and performance, and has gained a national and international reputation. She often explores themes such as portraiture, landscape and the sublime by using found tools and language from the worlds of the multinational corporation or global law firm.

Her solo exhibitions include the solo show Memento Park, touring to Eastside Projects, Birmingham, Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesborough in 2010-2011; Contracting Universe, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2010); Carey Young: Uncertain Contracts, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (2009); Speech Acts, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009); Counter Offer, The Power Plant, Toronto (2009); and Business as Usual, John Hansard Gallery & tour (2001.) She has participated in the British Art Show 6, the Moscow Biennale, Sharjah Biennale, Tirana Biennale and Taipei Biennale, and been included in many significant group exhibitions at venues including MoMA/PS1 (New York, the New Museum (New York), Hayward Gallery (London), ICA (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Frieze Projects at the Frieze Art Fair (London) and Secession (Vienna). Her works are in the collections of Arts Council England, Tate and the Centre Pompidou and she is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Cornerhouse presents a major touring solo show by artist Carey Young. Young, who grew up in Manchester and also studied here, is best known for her witty explorations of corporate and legal culture. Using a variety of media including video, photography, text and telephonic systems, Young examines these worlds, altering their language and tools to create fictional and absurd scenarios, which operate midway between performance and installation.
This exhibition, reconfigured for Cornerhouse, surveys the artist’s investigations of language, rhetoric and performance. The new video Memento Park (2010) extends and reframes Young’s interests in performance, politics and leftist ideas. Filmed in a statue park in Budapest, which contains a large collection of monumental, Soviet-era statues in poses of ‘suspended animation’, the piece relates these icons of propaganda to their newly suburban, but strangely idyllic setting.
The show also includes UK premieres of several works, such as Product Recall (2007), a video in which the artist undergoes a psychoanalyst session relating to contemporary advertising.

Profile:

Carey Young is a Senior Lecturer in Photography in the Faculty of Media at LCC. Having completed an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 1997, her artistic work employs a variety of media, including photography, video, text and performance, and has gained a national and international reputation. She often explores themes such as portraiture, landscape and the sublime by using found tools and language from the worlds of the multinational corporation or global law firm.

Her solo exhibitions include the solo show Memento Park, touring to Eastside Projects, Birmingham, Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesborough in 2010-2011; Contracting Universe, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2010); Carey Young: Uncertain Contracts, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (2009); Speech Acts, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009); Counter Offer, The Power Plant, Toronto (2009); and Business as Usual, John Hansard Gallery & tour (2001.) She has participated in the British Art Show 6, the Moscow Biennale, Sharjah Biennale, Tirana Biennale and Taipei Biennale, and been included in many significant group exhibitions at venues including MoMA/PS1 (New York, the New Museum (New York), Hayward Gallery (London), ICA (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Frieze Projects at the Frieze Art Fair (London) and Secession (Vienna). Her works are in the collections of Arts Council England, Tate and the Centre Pompidou and she is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.