SQUEEZE 'The Nearest Faraway Place', 2009, Vinyl print, 6 x 10 m, Courtesy of artists and MASTER PIPER, London

, 'The Nearest Faraway Place', 2009, Vinyl print, 6 x 10 m, Courtesy of artists and MASTER PIPER, London

SQUEEZE 'The Trinity' (extract), 2009, Lambda print, 50.8 x 40.6 cm x 3, Edition of 3, beside: 'Shrine III', 2009, Lenticular print, 50 x 40 cm, Edition of 2 + 1AP, Courtesy of artists and MASTER PIPER, London'

Pennicott+Fleming, 'The Trinity' (extract), 2009, Lambda print, 50.8 x 40.6 cm x 3, Edition of 3, beside: 'Shrine III', 2009, Lenticular print, 50 x 40 cm, Edition of 2 + 1AP, Courtesy of artists and MASTER PIPER, London'

SQUEEZE 'Shrine I', 2009, Lenticular print, 50 x 40 cm, Edition of 2 + 1 AP, Courtesy of artists and MASTER PIPER, London

Pennicott+Fleming, 'Shrine I', 2009, Lenticular print, 50 x 40 cm, Edition of 2 + 1 AP, Courtesy of artists and MASTER PIPER, London

SQUEEZE

9 Oct—4 Dec 2009

artists

Pennicott+Fleming

Tom Fleming & Edwin Pennicott are a collaborative. They are the first collaboration to be accepted to the Royal College of Art.

Pennicott+Fleming's work is concerned with the nature of perception, illusion, and the relation between the false and the real, the virtual and the physical. Their work deals with the perceptual capabilities of the camera and how the camera image is interpreted as a representation of a physical environment. The artists play on our assumptions about what we see and question the decisions that determine what we choose to look at.

For their first ‘solo’ show at Master Piper, running during Frieze Art Fair and Zoo Art Fair, Pennicott+Fleming will present a series of new works exploring notions of kitsch, illusion and the relation between the false and the real, the virtual and the physical.

Referencing cheap souvenirs, religious iconography and everyday items, the artists are interested in destabilising our reading of familiar objects and images. Working from the idea of object as cultural artefact, Pennicott & Fleming explore the implications of various modes of representation and the associations we have with particular forms of imagery.

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Edwin Pennicott and Tom Fleming met at Chelsea College of Art in 2001 whilst both studying Sculpture, and began working together in late 2002. Their first major piece as a collaboration was Office (2003), an entirely fabricated office space constructed in false perspective in which the artists performed the roles of workers carrying out mundane and repetitive tasks whilst being watched by the viewer via a CCTV camera linked to a monitor outside the space. Both humorous – the comic effect produced by the artists moving about within the false perspective environment – as well as a comment on the perceived monotony and boredom inherent in the stereotypical ‘office job’ and notions of work in general, the piece set up many of the themes that still dominate the artists’ practice.

The pair continued to work together throughout their time at Chelsea, culminating in a collaborative piece for their degree show – Celestial Cloud II & IV (2004). Having applied for the Sculpture MA at the Royal College of Art specifically as a collaboration, the artists became the first applicants to be accepted onto the course on this basis.

Continuing to work on a large scale and exploring the relationship between reality and its image, the physical and the virtual, they produced Harpoon (2005), which aimed to confuse the viewer’s perception of scale and played on time and memory as a function of interpretation. Building a semi-hidden scale model of the space within the constructed space itself, and showing an image of the model on a monitor, the work forced a double-take on the viewer, who was made to question their initial assumptions in light of their subsequent understanding.

Following this the artists began to experiment with smaller scale, more quickly produced works alongside the larger, environment/performance-based pieces. In the summer of 2005 they showed three of these works: Race Event, a small monitor-based piece; Chairs, a series of three two dimensional chairs placed around the space as illusory chairs in the peripheral vision; and Earthquake Zone, the pair’s first video piece. For their MA show in May the artists produced their most expansive and ambitious work to date, Mitchell & Norman (2006). Essentially a two-part work, a full-scale, semi-realistic domestic landing space was built in the gallery, which the viewer was encouraged to enter; and in another –-inaccessible - building off-site was a constructed warehouse/storeroom environment that the artists occupied and fulfilled the roles of workers performing ambiguous yet familiarly mundane tasks. This was shown via live-link CCTV on a monitor located on the outside of the landing space in the gallery. Both through a literal association (the recurring view through the doorway which is replicated in the second space in a large-scale photograph) and in a psychological sense, the viewer is encouraged to make links between the two spaces, the one they can experience physically and the other they can only experience visually from a static viewpoint.

Soon after graduating the artists were invited to take part in a group show of several collaborative pairs called Double Acts, at The Royal Standard gallery in Liverpool, where they showed a new piece, In-Out (2006). The piece consisted of a plastic ketchup bottle and a CCTV camera mounted in the lid, which is repeatedly thrust in and out of the bottle by a motorised mechanism and whose image is shown on an adjacent monitor as a pulsating red spot. ‘The whirring, motorised motion is in turn sexual, soothing then plain irritating, much like some relationships’ (Liverpool Metro). The work was later selected for the Species of Spaces exhibition at Pitrowski, Berlin.

The artists were invited to do a residency at the Tram Depot Gallery in Clapton, East London, in August 2006, culminating in an exhibition in February 2007 of work produced during their time there, entitled Conmen Felting Tip. As well as the eponymous performance installation around which the show was centred, the artists exhibited work in a range of media including photography, glass and several kinetic and light based works.

In November 2008 Pennicott & Fleming produced a new piece entitled Working Hard Doing Nothing as a result of a residency at Artsadmin in Aldgate East, London. For the first time the artists chose to use performers in the work rather than appear themselves. As well as exploring ongoing themes of workplace, repetition and the mundane, and utilising familiar tools such as live CCTV images of a hidden environment, the work marked a significant departure in being set on top of a specially constructed, brightly coloured floor, evoking spaces as diverse as a gameshow set and industrial warehouse flooring.

The artists were recently commissioned to create a new work for White Night in Brighton, a one-off all night arts festival taking place at the end of October.


The artists live and work in London.