Hollington & Kyprianou: The Castle
Date uploaded: August 13, 2014
Launching in association with Folkestone Fringe, Hoodwink’s new commission by artist duo Hollington & Kyprianou entitled 'The Castle', populates the town’s Wilko Hardware Store to create an oddly different retail experience. While customers shop for homeware products, they might stumble upon subtle and less subtle interventions linking the history and practice of art production with that of home improvement.
'The Castle' on display at Wilko Hardware Store, Folkestone from the 28th of August 2014 until February 2015, is a shifting, changing homage to the everyday and ordinary of 2014, overlapping the language of the museum and gallery with that of the retail environment at the point where sculpture, product design and branding intersect.
The Castle conflates art with DIY on Wilko's shop signage, information boards and caption panels; as a history of rainbows in art on a goods lift door, picture frames and photobooks; on paint displays and colour charts recalling William Burroughs’ shotgun paintings, John Latham’s spray can works; as DIY takes on Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void; and on the synthetic household paints used by Jack ‘The Dripper’ Pollock. The shop's public address system occasionally interrupts the central broadcast to deliver staff perspectives on art and DIY.
Hollington and Kyprianou have been collaborating for 15 years. Their work has been shown at Tate Modern, ICA London as well as internationally in North and South America, Australia and Europe including the 51st Venice Biennale.
The Castle is the sixth project realised by Hoodwink as part of its 3-year site-specific commissioning programme in the everyday places of Kent, and follows on from the launch of Simon Faithfull’s Things for Morrisons Supermarket in Tunbridge Wells. Things is a book of 116 new and archive drawings of the items that the artist has encountered in his life, created digitally using Palm Pilots or iPhones. Faithfull has hidden 500 of the books in the supermarket, where they await chance discovery by shoppers, and are available to browse or buy for just a penny.
Challenging formal presentations of contemporary art in museums and galleries, Hoodwink disrupts the fabric of everyday life with site-specific commissions in diverse ‘live’ environments. They collaborate with emerging and established artists on works of chance encounter and intervention that respond to an immediate locale whether a music venue, pub, supermarket, leisure centre or shopping mall.
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