Open Frequency
Open Frequency is a curated online programme presenting new developments in contemporary art. Selected artists are nominated by key curators, writers and artists from across the UK. Recently profiled Scotland-based artists include Katy Dove, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, Camilla Low, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins.
Open Frequency is a programme area of Axis, the arts council funded leading online resource for the contemporary art community.
Kate Owens and Tommy Grace graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2002 and along with five other graduates set up the exhibition 'Win Together Lose Together Play Together Stay Together' in a former betting shop in Edinburgh.
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In November 2003 they set up the Embassy Gallery and have since been of central importance to the Edinburgh art scene, playing a key role in establishing the tone and form of Embassy exhibitions and events. |
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According to Neil Mulholland they add 'a strong dash of Bacchanalian flavour to the proceedings and aesthetics'.
He nominated Owens & Grace for Open Frequency on the strength of their collaborative contributions to The Garden (Castlefield, Manchester) and Function Form Follows (Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee), both exhibitions being led by their example.
He states, 'The growing ambition of their own practices is of key importance, as is the way that their interests and approaches have been dovetailing over the past five years around aspirational interiors and dusty architectural follies. In contrast to Glasgow artists’ text-book obsession with International Modernist architecture and design, Owens and Grace’s work takes its cues from the mongrel styles of the East coast of Scotland (Lothians and the Kingdom of Fife), a regional architectural baroque which they filter through everyday experiences and materials (binging on Lambrini in the park), outdated optical-tricks such as 3D, romantic ghost-stories and tacky power-how-to (Peter York’s latest book Dictator’s Homes would be a good primer)'.
Neil Mulholland on Owens and Grace
The following is an extract taken from Neil Mulholland's article on their recent practice to be published in full on Open Frequency:
'Kate Owens and Tommy Grace share a curiosity with the decorative and its relatively low esteem in a contemporary design environment relentlessly pursuing the dictum of ‘less is more’ (profit). Loosely Loosian design values have regrouped since the 1990s when Brutalism and neo-modernism resurfaced in the form of style bars, ‘destination’ boudoir hotels and right-to-buy council housing (so long as it was in Notting Hill and designed by Erno Goldfinger).
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Typical products of gentrification, these developments were unevenly distributed, more visible, perhaps, in post-industrial city centres than in so-called ‘heritage’ sites such as Edinburgh. |
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While Edinburgh is not without its Ron Aradesque hotels and bars, mock-docks and post-war modernist housing schemes, its centre is disproportionately ripe with listed buildings, making it difficult to escape the past. In such a neo-baroque environment, nostalgia for a singularly modernist version of a designed utopia has to compete with numerous other ideals.
Thus the normative text-book based obsession with International Modernist architecture and design that we find in so much of contemporary art - a melancholic lingua franca articulating something that was never experienced by most young artists - is replaced with a more holistic view of what it meant to be modern in our different pasts.
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In Owens & Grace’s work, the environments bestowed upon us from the past become playgrounds for present occupants who re-narrate them in their own images to meet their own agendas, making them new once more'. |
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The Curse and the Pestilence (RSA, Edinburgh, 2006) as in previous collaborative work, illustrates a friction between the personal work of Kate Owens and Tommy Grace in which the classical decorum of Grace’s visual language becomes a playground for Owens, an irreverent satyr that sullies the holy font and relieves herself against the pillars of establishment.
The stark white lines of a paper façade are distastefully interrupted by a sweeping Technicolor yawn that graces its pristine pedestal; a by-product of the red wine that capitalizes the scene. Like the writing on the wall at the feast of Belshazzar, a message has miraculously materialised. Conjured in a chance configuration of regurgitated food-stuffs, this nauseous mosaic appears like a warning and a curse on this house:
ABRAKEBABRA
BRAKEBABRA
RAKEBABRA
AKEBABRA
KEBABRA
EBABRA
BABRA
ABRA
BRA
RA
A
The Ill Tempered Waters (2005) was a collaborative performance and installation for Function Form Follows, in the Cooper Gallery of Dundee University.
In a thrilling display reminiscent of cheap holiday resort entertainment, loaded bottles of pop are shaken and emptied, shooting their explosive cargo in a kaleidoscope of shocking colour.
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Cola follows Blackcurrant follows Cherryade follows Tizer, pink grapefruit precedes limeade follows Appletise through cream soda to lemonade. The resultant canvas, an artificially-enhanced spectrum of toxins, could be the work of a Greenberg endorsed American Hero-Painter. |
The spectacle weighs in at a premature two minutes. As the music fades out so the entertainment value fades and shifts queasily toward revulsion as the fumes of the juice reach the audience.'
Bacchanalien (Castlefield Gallery, Manchester 2005) A spectral twilight descends on the scene, filtered through the bastard child of the vino that once was consumed here. Bevvy bottles stacked high where ivy should grow. Here satyrs forage cross patios and behind wheelie bins. The revelry has passed Hadrian’s palatial garden.
We Don’t Do Duvets (2006) part of Four: a group exhibition exploring the legacy of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, J Herbert McNair and their wives, Margaret and Frances Macdonald. Contradicting the held notion of artist as bohemian, provocateurs at the avant-garde, Owens and Grace focus on the artists’ off-duty moments: the private hangovers and pillow talk.
Owens and Grace re-enact an imagined moment between the courting Charles and Margaret. The young lovers, half dressed and prostrate, are viewed on their bed from above. The recipients of a seemingly god-given creativity they appear to embody the Glasgow style even whilst asleep; the chance juxtaposition of their bodies conjuring a familiar scene…
Biography
Owens & Grace first collaborated for The Garden, an exhibition in Castlefield Gallery (Manchester 2005). Further collaborative exhibitions have included Function Form Follows, Cooper Gallery, DJCAD (Dundee 2005), In-Residence, The Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh 2006) and Four, Collins Gallery (Glasgow 2006).
Previous individual solo exhibitions include Ambush at Lovers' Rock (Tommy Grace) at Aurora in Edinburgh, 2004 and Gates of Ades (Kate Owens) Collective Gallery’s off-site project in Edinburgh, 2005.
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Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Young Athenians, which will be restaged as part of the Athens Biennial: Destroy Athens (Sep 2007).
Kate Owens and Tommy Grace have recently relocated to London where they live together. Kate is currently on the MA Sculpture course at The Royal College of Art. | |