Keep Me Posted
Julia Royse’s Keep Me Posted exhibition – featuring mail-based art – is open at 67 Wilton Way
Email and text messages abound where envelopes and stamps once reigned supreme, but what about the simple pleasure of receiving a personal letter?
Curator Julia Royse began by having “Posted” stationary specially made, then handwrote letters to artists inviting them to participate in the show. Thus began a correspondence by post, with the artists responding in their own particular ways. Claire Brewster, for example, used the envelope’s diaphanous lining to create a picture in the style of a Chinese watercolour.
Royse, who lives in Shoreditch, is currently setting up the show in a former post office next to London Fields. She gained temporary access to the space through the previous Government’s Vacant Shops Fund and will also be running two other postal-related exhibitions after “Keep Me Posted” – which is due to run from Friday 2 July to Sunday 26 September.
The show is set to include around 26 artists, of which a number hail from Hackney. There will be painting (James White’s photorealist Electricity Bill), mixed media pieces (including a bleached set of Third Reich stamps featuring Hitler’s portrait), sculpture (Andreas Blank’s Parcel carved from stone) and even some site-specific installations (one of which being Oliver Clegg’s Writing Station for visitors to sit down and write a letter). Tracey Emin will also be displaying at the show.
Royse, who moved to the UK from Canada in the 1980s, was a founding director and co-curator of the White Cube gallery in Hoxton. She believes that letter writing is a dying art and mentioned the fact that many children these days don’t know what it’s like to get a letter by mail. It seems that people only use the post for Ebay, Amazon and occasionally to transport drugs.
According to the French philosopher Pierre Levy, however, text is a thing of the past. He believes that all this messaging, emailing and videoing will be the (recordable) language of the future, a language in which everyone will be equally fluent, with no noticeable class or educational distinctions. He calls this the theory of “Superlanguage”, whereby the invention of text was merely a means to and end.
From an anthropological standpoint, one might observe that this exhibition is proving his theory. By taking the act of letter writing and putting it on display Royse is emphasizing the rarity and uniqueness of this act. Writing about Bedouins in Jordan, anthropologist Linda Layne has noted that as pieces of culture end up on display in museums, so do they disappear from everyday life.
Whereas my mother still sends out about a hundred hand written greeting cards during the holiday season, I just send a group email. But after meeting Julia about this exhibition I have decided to take a step backwards, like Charlemagne trying to teach himself to write Latin on a wax tablet long after its obsolescence, and return to the magic and more personal act of letter writing.
Keep Me Posted
67 Wilton Way
Hackney E8 1BG
Opening times:
Thursday – Sunday 11am-5pm, or else by appointment
mail@postedprojects.co.uk
Keep Me Posted is part of CREATE10, a unique arts festival that celebrates the wealth of homegrown artistic talent, cultural institutions and iconic arts venues that thrive in the London 2012 host boroughs.