SOME FIFTY MILES OF CONCRETE PAVEMENT – David Birkin & Jeremy Hutchison
(Art) AMALGAMATED
317 10th Avenue
Ground Floor North
New York, NY 10001
May 7 – June 22
(Art) Amalgamated is pleased to present SOME FIFTY MILES OF CONCRETE PAVEMENT featuring the work of David Birkin & Jeremy Hutchison.
“Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today.” – Walter de Maria
On a day in April, Birkin walks 25 miles northeast across the Mojave Desert. At the same time, Hutchison leaves his studio in east London and walks 25 miles southwest. They fail to meet in the midd Some Fifty Miles of Concrete Pavement is a collaboration between David Birkin and Jeremy Hutchison. For the period of this project, the two artists worked in geographical isolation: one in the US, the other in the UK. Through sculpture, video, sound, text and photography, the exhibition documents the complications of this virtual exchange, and their repeated efforts to meet — both physically and ideologically — and to bridge the ocean between them
Starting with Eisenhower’s 1953 speech The Chance for Peace* the collaborators soon veered off course, wandering through conversational territories in their effort to find common ground. As such, this new body of work is an attempt at correspondence. It is a monument to the mismatched: a study of conflict from conflicting perspectives, and an exercise in equivalence. It is about proximity and scale, land art and Skype. And it’s about friendship.
Jeremy Hutchison (b. 1979) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art. Having trained in linguistics and written advertising for Coca-Cola, his work plunges a disruptive logic into the smooth mechanisms of industrial production and consumer ideology. In a recent exhibition, Hutchison transformed Paradise Row gallery into the boutique of ERRATUM®, a dysfunctional luxury brand. His work has exhibited internationally, including shows at Saatchi New Sensations, V&A Museum, Zabludowicz Collection, Liste, Grand Union, Z33, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, and a commission for the Southbank Centre. Earlier this year, he returned from a residency with Delfina Foundation. This will culminate in a show at London’s ICA in June.
David Birkin (b. 1977) studied anthropology at Oxford and fine art at the Slade. His work foregrounds the failures of photography as a way of reflecting on loss, focusing on depictions of war and points at which the personal and political collide. Birkin was an artist in residence on VLA’s Art & Law program in NY and recently completed a film funded by the Arts Council, England. He was the recipient of the Sovereign Art Prize (Barbican, London), Celeste Art Prize (Museo Centrale Montemartini, Rome) and a National Media Museum bursary, and has exhibited at the Courtauld Institute, Photographers’ Gallery, Saatchi New Sensations, Solyanaka State Gallery, Moscow, and Tallinn Kunstihoone, Estonia. He is currently on a fellowship at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. […] The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.”
– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
