David Dale Gallery & Studios present Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division, the first major Scottish solo exhibition by Glasgow based artist Ric Warren. Through large scale installation and prints Warren works toward an interpretation of contemporary urban theory which deliberately belies the exhibition title’s essayist invocation. The exhibition, offered as a synthesis, does not attempt at conclusions drawn from research – rather, distils such research into unavoidable questions for the viewer.
The installations that part constitutes Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division find them self at odds with the typical delineation of architectural and sculptural space, where the former makes space and the latter takes it, Warren’s installations operate in between demarcating and reifying it. Taking their reference from the construction site hoardings that divide cities, metonymic for progress, the installations are to sculpture what civic engineering is to architecture – functional separation. While addressing the barriers erected as shifting socio – spatial boundaries, Warren imposes his own without bias, with the disruption emphasising the symbiotic and semantic relationships that arise.
Also incorporating geometric and cartographic print work Borders, Boundaries & Barricades: Redeveloping Geographies of Division considers the abstract and graphical groundwork implicit in rationalising these divisions. Work, which broken down into elemental signifiers, does nothing to illuminate the outcomes, only attempt to rationalise that which is unfinished and incoherent.
Ric Warren lives and works in Glasgow. He graduated from Glasgow School of Art 2008. Selected recent exhibitions include: LUDO, Pigeon Wing Studio Residency, August 2010; FUTUREPROOF (In collaboration with Katherine Gallacher, curated by PLACE projects), Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, January 2010; Constructs, Whitehouse Gallery, Glasgow, August 2009.