Exterior. Day was shown as part of Mark McGowan’s Festival at Space Station 65, East Dulwich in July – August 2006. The Festival event was entitled There Is Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You and was curated by Alexandra MacGilp. The press release follows.

There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You

Friday 28 – Sunday 30 July 2006, Space Station Sixty-five,65 North Cross Road, East Dulwich, SE22 9ET>

Rhiannon Armstrong / Tobias Collier / Richard Dedomenici / Samuel Dowd

Nick Ferguson / Ludovica Gioscia / Tim Graves / William Hunt / Adrian Lee

Rummana Naqvi / P.4orn / Siôn Parkinson / Mark Wayman / Laura Wilson

Curated by Ali MacGilp

PROGRAMME OF EVENTS

Friday 28th July

6.30 – 9 pm Private View with performances in the gallery and a celebration of Space Station Sixty-five's fourth birthday. Tim Graves will launch The Plight of the Waders his weekend walk around the future landscape of climate-change London, which imagines the Thames were to flood her banks. A map in the gallery will allow you to learn whether your street would survive the deluge unscathed.

7.30 pm Untitled (Morse), the first of Samuel Dowd’s weekend of Close Encounters. Using low-fi signaling and sound equipment an attempt will be made to contact nearby satellites and passing lifeforms from the deck of the mothership. Translating a selection of popular music and local data into Morse code, crewmembers SD and SS create a cacophonous symphony for South London Space Cadets.

8.30 pm United in Joy performance by P.4orn

Saturday 29th July

9 am – 5 pm Rhiannon Armstrong Can I Help You? sited at the pelican crossing on Lordship Lane, near Space Station 65, maps will be available at the gallery.

Can I Help You? Calling all residents of East Dulwich and the surrounding area!

Been meaning to move that sofa from the basement to the spare room for months, but couldn’t face it alone? Not sure what to do about that all important life-changing decision and need a fresh point of view? Rhiannon Armstrong (STRONG ARMS, HELPING HANDS) will be available to all for FREE general help on Saturday, 29th July, from 9.00am to 5.00pm. She will be well equipped with D.I.Y. tools a plenty, sewing kits, philosophical advice and handcream, and based at a pelican crossing nearby. Her skills include: map reading/ emergency sewing/ crossing roads/ carrying bags/ sticking it all back together/ holding ladder bottoms/doors open/ hypothetical advice/ finding the silver lining/ worrying about global issues/ singing along to happy music/ hysterical optimism. So go on, buy that extra bag of melons, there’s someone here to help you carry them home!

12 midday – 3 pm Siôn Parkinson Viewings or People Should Not Travel. Or Read.Viewings of residential property for sale/to let in close proximity to the gallery will be offered to visitors to the gallery. Each tour will be scheduled and will be led by a representative from one of our local estate agents. Become an active participant in the production of these spaces to be consumed through this specially tailored experience. Come into the gallery to sign up for an appointment.

3.30 pm Meet at the café by the lake in Dulwich Park for Mark Wayman performance ofHeaven. Wayman uses the simplest of means, no props, only what is there, taking the site as a readymade. His meticulous deadpan descriptions of places are archaeological studies of the present. Untold secret histories reside in their specifics, there is no need to speculate. As Wayman’s words peel off from the scene he is showing us, we are forced to fully notice our surroundings and our sense of the world is sharpened as a sublime sense of an infinite number of possible truths seeps in. Dulwich Park is about a 15 minute walk from the gallery. Maps will be available, buses 12, P4, P13, 185, 312, 176, 40, nearest rail, North Dulwich.

4pm The second instalment of Samuel Dowd’s Close Encounters is Flying Saucepans! which takes place in Dulwich Park near the lake. SD invites local participants to be involved in the creation of a mass UFO sighting that will be documented as photographic images. Those who wish to participate are asked to bring saucepan lids, Frisbees, hub-caps and other household objects that they would like to see launched into the skies over Dulwich.

5 – 6 pm Siôn Parkinson Viewings or People Should Not Travel. Or Read continues as above.

Sunday 30th July

12 midday – 6 pm Laura Wilson will be in the gallery’s garden performing Sunday Lunch, in which she invites visitors to help her feed the birds with specially prepared space food. In the gallery and garden Samuel Dowd will display the results of the previous day’s hoax attempt, accompanied by a series of sculptural works.

4-6 pm Rhiannon Armstrong will be in the gallery's bathroom presenting Everything You Ever Wanted to Say But Didn’t – Vol. I, a scratch performance / mass psychological exercise, based on real testimony. ‘Something was left unsaid the last time we spoke, and I think it’s time we clear the air… ‘Better out than in’; (anyone’s grandmother – and she was right you know).’ Book a five minute slot or just pop in.

THROUGHOUT THE WEEKEND AT THE GALLERY

In front of the gallery

Nick Ferguson’s neon sign sited on the gallery façade sets the scene for the action using conventional film-script abbreviation. Adrian Lee has kindly offered to provide additional promotional support for the weekend’s exhibition. He has produced and will operate a congenial, anthropomorphic device that will highlight the purpose of the space and help attract visitors.

Inside the Gallery

Tobias Collier presents Model of the Universe # 2 (Astro-Abluter) which meditates on the fullness of time. Is time running out? Have we reached the fullness of time? Well, time is still on our side, and stitches in time will always save nine. Collier examines our subliminal relationship to space using the flotsam and jetsam of daily existence. He melds notions of the infinite with everyday materials, yoking together the materially contingent with the intellectually imponderable. Through juxtaposing the domestic and the inter-stellar, he lyrically demonstrates how scale, speed and time are relative. He glimpses the universe in the bathtub, unswerving in his examination of man's striving towards an understanding of the cosmos.

William Hunt will show a new sound sculpture incorporating elements from his recent performances with a drawing/proposal for a new work. In his performances Hunt treats the song as a readymade. He performs songs in situations of self-inflicted stress: drifting off into the horizon on a raft; in a dustbin full of water, suspended upside down; with his head in a bucket. He plays with the postures of the macho performance artist, the tragic hero, the comedian, the rock star. His feats of endurance are intense and suspenseful acts of communication.

Ludovica Gioscia’s latest work is an investigation of Las Vegas’s promise of the ultimate extravagant fantasy. In her Baroque screenprints, escapism becomes a Disney-esque psychedelic nightmare. Shimmering images of tacky casinos resonate with a dazzling glamour. Experienced through the hangover of the morning after, this candy-coloured sensory overload leaves a sickly feeling. Laura Wilson’s sculpture Egg concentrates a beam of light from a desk lamp onto the intense yellow of an egg yolk. It cooks slowly, eventually becoming noxious.

Rummana Naqvi presents Flying Carpet, a rug whose corners are attached to black balloons on string. The carpet is in, fact, unable to fly and this lends the work a palpable tension. The balloons will it to rise upwards, trying to make it into what it appears and fails to be. This hybrid fantasy object lies caught between two states, searching for an identity The balloons in turn are weighed down by the carpet and cannot escape. A kind of truce has been reached and a sense of balance, even harmony, is achieved between these interdependent entities.

Richard Dedomenici gives us a preview of his recent Fame Asylum project, the subject of a Channel Four documentary to be screened in the autumn. Last month Dedomenici held auditions in London with the aim of inviting four young male asylum seekers to form a vocal harmony boyband that would be launched as part of Refugee Week 2006. Following the audition process and confirmation of the line-up, the band underwent an intensive two-week rehearsal process in which they received vocal training, choreography lessons, stylist makeovers, and recorded a demo of their debut single A Guy Like Me. The band’s first live performance was at the Celebrating Sanctuary event at South Bank. The project is concerned with shifting perceptions and understandings of the experiences of asylum seekers.

In the Garden at the rear of the gallery

Pigeons in the garden will be surveying the neighbourhood from the glory of Nick Ferguson’sThe Levin Apartment Building, an imposing Art Deco folly/dovecote. Smaller birds will be able to board Laura Wilson’s Moon Pigeons, avian space ships constructed of kitchen utensils.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition in the gallery space will form the command centre from which performers will be propelled out to satellite locations in the East Dulwich area, inviting participation from locals and visitors. The artists have made works in response to the invitation to show at Space Station Sixty-five. They have taken inspiration from the shop front and domestic feel of the gallery, and the rapid changes occurring in the surrounding area. The exhibition and events will take on a life of their own over the weekend.</p>

The artists seek to alter conventional behaviour patterns in some common scenarios of human interaction; our brief relationships with the people who stop us in the street to sell us something or convert us, the estate agent who hams up his role as the ‘expert’. They propose and invite us to embrace different forms of personal exchange. Their enquiries seek to unearth the wondrous in our everyday experiences, in our relationship to language, objects and the other. They acknowledge difficulties of language and gesture, and attempt to bridge or inhabit the gap between themselves and the spectator. They endeavour to establish a lyrical relationship to narratives of place. Many of the artists have recycled domestic objects in their work and re-imagined them in poetic new ways. Some of the performances do not declare their status as works of art and quietly question our need to categorise activities. Their tours and interventions momentarily coax hidden narratives to the surface as they trespass upon your time.

Also apparent is an acute interest in the ways we define our position in the universe and our aspirations as human beings, through our fantasies and categories. Whether it’s looking to Outer Space or the hierarchies we impose on the animal kingdom. Pigeons, once an important food source, have only relatively recently been deemed vermin and we are now banned from feeding them. In fact, it is our dirty habits that are responsible for their omnipresence. Outer Space is a seductive site of fantasy for the human mind, it seems apparently free of politics and religion, although in fact we routinely project our beliefs onto it. This is exemplified in the crass, clumsy and xenophobic subtexts of Hollywood movies but exploited beautifully by good science fiction writers. Other precarious contemporary fantasies include waiting to be discovered on a reality television show such as Pop Idol, the artificial architectural reconstructions of Las Vegas, the landscaped green parks in inner city parks designated to keep the urban population healthy and productive. The human consequences of our short- sighted actions, that make disaster movies a tangible reality, will be revealed. Things left unsaid, ominous and ambiguous utterances; things are going to change, whether you like it or not. There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You.

For details of how to get to the gallery visit www.spacestationsixtyfive.com