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ArchiveExhibition

Fergal Stapleton

11 Oct-22 Dec 2009

V22 Silvertown Studios
London E16 2GL

Overview

'If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul'. Installation can be a fugitive medium, especially so in Stapleton's hands; his installations resist simple documentation, no part can be consumed in a single image. The records - art press articles, catalogues, reviews - can give only a fragmentary sense of the adjustments he makes which amount to something like the flooding of a room with the subtleties of its own nature. For his show at V22, Stapleton has gradually transformed the 1000 sq ft room. His method is to add and subtract in small doses; to adjust and play back some existing features; to design a simple, useful, and slightly comic area; to 'decorate' certain features with some underachieving paraphernalia of celebration; to make changes which ambiguously announce themselves as part of the work or part of the environment of the work, the total effect being that of precision, subtle intensification, increase of degree.