Propositions for a stage: 24 frames of a beautiful heaven

Artists: Amanda Beech, Zach Blas, Uriel Orlow, Rabih Mroué and Ming Wong

Curated by Bridget Crone

Propositions for a Stage: 24 Frames of a Beautiful Heaven considers questions of performance and staging in relation to time through a range of projects that include works on paper, video installation, sculpture and sound. Taking their cue from dramaturgy and theater design, the individual works in Propositions for a Stage are presented within the space of the gallery as a series of discrete “worlds” that point to the tangled relationship between time, technology and the body.

Propositions for a Stage transforms the gallery into constellation of micro-theaters. It explores the impact that theater practice has upon exhibition making, such as in Ming Wong’s installation The Bamboo Theater (2017), which dramatizes its construction utilizing the reveal–conceal conceit that lies at the heart of theater.

The exhibition demands that we consider the different possibilities for time beyond chronological or “clock” time. Works by Wong, Uriel Orlow and Rabih Mroué address the ways in which the past, present and future might be entangled, layered, disordered or projected onto one another. Similarly Amanda Beech’s works on paper utilize advertising and pop imagery alongside references to gaming and computational form to question the relationship between time, cause and effect.

To enter into the space–time of the stage is to cross a threshold into a world apart, a place of speculation—a place to test the “real”. In Propositions for a Stage, this world is a place in which the limits of time and the body are investigated. Zach Blas’s series of videos and accompanying sculptures Face Cages (2014–16) show the body and its relationship to technology through a series of “endurance performances” in which the body is tested against its own biometric measurement.