PAT FOSTER & JEN BEREAN ON PUBLIC
It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s new exhibition ‘On Public’ at Ryan Renshaw Gallery.
The role of public artists is usually to place things in space but Pat Foster and Jen Berean seem to be more interested in taking things away or rearranging what is already there.
Our projects in the past have rephrased the functions and information embedded in particular spaces. We like this idea of rearticulating form rather than adding, because it’s the antithesis of the monument in public sculpture. We like the idea of using objects as a medium, repositioning them to bring a new reading while maintaining their original resonance. Ultimately our works are new proposals from old thoughts.
- Pat Foster and Jen Berean
Foster and Berean have been working collaboratively since 2001. Through their practice they reveal different ways of connecting artists, audiences and ideas. Their interventions, events, found or stolen objects and architectural visions intervene with the understood functions of architecture and design, public spaces, and institutional and social infrastructure.
Foster and Berean collaborate because of the capacity for positive conflict to take place. It is this conflict that both facilitates and inspires their work. It is two minds approaching one aim, this is to produce artwork. Because their artwork is a direct result of their choice to work together, the work that they make requires interaction, intervention and discussion, all of which becomes an integral and important part of the work itself.
Common across their practice is the tendency to re-inscribe new meaning and purpose onto discarded objects and materials. This pull towards the reconstitution of materials highlights the instability of original signification, pointing to the endless possibilities for the subjective appropriation of the found and discarded.
As well as re-inscribing new meaning into found and discarded objects, the duo have adopted the tropes of minimalism and engaged them in a vexatious dialogue with post-conceptualism. Within the working methodology of this collaboration there seems to exist a tug-of-war between aesthetic formalism and rampant destruction. Simultaneously it values and undermines purity, structure, beauty and resolution. It envisages the work as a kind of process, whereby outcomes that appear to have been reached are retreated upon, thus delineating a particularised finality.
Their work also uses the language of architecture as a device to approach societal concerns. The series “The Problem With Stability” in 2007 revealed both an aggressive destruction and a passive decay of materials. The materials are halted at a point of stylised instability. Each piece is inherently linked to its moment of accident, damage, violence or decay.