The Stephen Lawrence Gallery

16th Sept – 12th Oct 2011 (PREVIEW: Thursday 15th September, 6-8pm)

THE KNIGHT TURNS ITS HEAD AND LAUGHS

Tom Hackney & Lizi Sánchez

The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London

Lizi Sánchez and Tom Hackney consider structural games and the spontaneity of play as modes of thinking about contemporary art production.

“There is a long philosophical tradition of associating art, aesthetic experience and play as constituting forms of liberation from an increasingly instrumentalised and administered world. Game / play: if the first term implies sets of pre-given rules and structures, the second points towards forms of open-ended and exploratory activity, which may or may not happen within the regulating limits of a game.

Lizi Sánchez and Tom Hackney operate from rather different positions along this spectrum. Sánchez broadly emphasizes aesthetic, semiotic and material play: the open selection, manipulation and recombination of visual elements, the pleasure produced in formal and aesthetic solutions, and a certain comedic relation to art historical models (especially in her sculpture). Hackney tends towards an analysis of the game: his method typically involves an initial decision, from which unfolds a set of technical procedures, the results of which might be surprising but the logic of which is pre-determined.”

(Excerpt from ‘Moves, Throws, Plays’,  Ed Krčma, Summer 2011)

The exhibition is accompanied a publication featuring ‘Moves, Throws, Plays’, an essay by Dr. Ed Krčma, published by Greenwich University Press.

Artists Discussion & Publication Launch

2pm, Saturday 8th October

The Stephen Lawrence Gallery

To Play for the Sake of Playing?

Artists Lizi Sánchez and Tom Hackney, along with writer Ed Krčma will discuss and develop ideas arising from the exhibition The Knight Turns its Head and Laughs and the accompanying text ‘Moves, Plays, Throws’.