Verlan @ 12around1 Gallery.

'Verlan'

12 around 1 Gallery. 14th - 22nd January 2012

Exhibited artists -

Majed Aslam, Joel Beach, Jeremy Brann, Edward Cotterill, Sam Griffin, Gabor Gyory, Fay Nicolson, Dear Mr. Quistgaard, Clunie Reid, Oliver Smith, David Treloar & Simon Willems.

Verlan is a form of slang used in urban France, in which the first and last syllables of a word are inverted. The word Verlan is composed by inverting the syllables in ‘l’envers’, which is itself the French word for inverse. As a word, Verlan very tightly contains its function within its form.

For many of the artists in this exhibition, their work is based on a reordering of the everyday and the familiar. Central to this is a process of revisiting, though not looking, in a conventional empirical sense, but of the already familiar. The works draw on a familiarity, which exists in two respects, that of the everyday, of commercial and digital imagery and in terms of art, of historical motifs. As withVerlan, the works mediate a duality between the artwork and work’s referencing of the everyday as it exists in the material’s common usage, outside of the gallery.

Through the separation of form from its context each work establishes its own discrepancy between itself as art, and the context from which it is derived. Equally the art works duality, and subtle discrepancy announces the function of the gallery, as a space where the re-framing of common information is possible.

“More quickly than Moscow, one gets to know Berlin through Moscow”

Walter Benjamin

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Within the gallery, the language of commercial imagery becomes re-contextualised. It exposes the differing, underlying motivations which exist in the different applications of an image. In being removed from their audience they are deprived of their function as well as their coercive powers. The replication of language, in a way as for its form to remain, but for it to be stripped of its intention, shows the discrepancy between art and commercial imagery. Equally, as is found in slang, a number of the artists are concerned with the framing of information. The effect, through addressing the form of content, is to find a parity between the intention of language, which in the case of many of the artists forms the basis for social critique, through the social regulation of language, and the material of that language.

6 Flavours. David Treloar, Concrete 2012