Smith/Stewart: Enter Love and Enter Death

3 November 2007 to 3 February 2008. Tues - Sun, 10am - 5.30pm

Smith/Stewart: installation view; "Enter Love and Enter Death, figures 1-6, 2007" (detail), Inverleith House, 2008.

Enter Love and Enter Death by Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart was made for Inverleith House. Installed throughout the seven rooms, handmade sculptural elements divided the space and the field of view in a typically pared-back way, leading the viewer to consider the building itself within the Garden beyond.

The elements consisted of identical girder-like sections, each tailored to fit the space, which contrasted with the delicacy and irregularity of their eighteenth-century surroundings and its more recent additions. Placed at eye level, these beams seem to confront and obstruct, the entire structure only comprehensible in the mind’s eye or imagination, occupying the borderline between the material and the insubstantial.

Concerned with a fundamental interest in the extremes of action and reactions, Smith/Stewart’s stark sculptural set-ups explore both personal and power relations (as did their early performance-to-camera video installations) and serve to heighten awareness of ourselves and our surroundings.

This show presented for the first time a new body of work funded by the Creative Scotland Award which Smith/Stewart received in 2006, for; "a period of research, development and studio-based production towards an exhibition of a new body of 'live' sculptural installations which explore intimacy and threat." A publication will be produced to accompany the exhibition.

Smith/Stewart: installation view; "Enter Love and Enter Death, figures 1-6, 2007" (detail), Inverleith House, 2008.

Stephanie Smith and Eddie Stewart have been working collaboratively, as Smith/Stewart, since the mid-Nineties and have shown widely in the UK and internationally. Selected solo shows include: Hooded. Bared., Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (1998); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (1999); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1999); A Black Thread, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2002); MK-G, Milton Keynes (2004), Barbarism begins at home, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Inc. NY, USA (2005); Gi: Glasgow International (2005). Selected group exhibitions include: Lyon Biennale, France (1995/6); Melbourne Biennial, Australia (1999); Seeing Time, San Francisco MOMA, USA (2000); Black Box, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2001); Incommunicado, a Hayward Gallery Touring show, various UK venues (2003); Night Sites, Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2005) and Into Me / Out of Me PS1 MoMA, New York, USA & KunstWerke ICA, Berlin, Germany (2006).

Awards include: SAC Artists' Award (2001); The Henry Moore Sculpture Fellowship, The British School at Rome (2002); Creative Scotland Award (2006). Their work is represented in public collections in the UK, Europe, the USA and Japan: including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Arts Council Collection, England and the Tate Collection, London.

They work and live together in Glasgow.

Smith/Stewart: installation view; "Enter Love and Enter Death, figures 1-6, 2007" (detail), Inverleith House, 2008.

Smith/Stewart: installation view; "Enter Love and Enter Death, figures 1-6, 2007" (detail), Inverleith House, 2008.

All work courtesy of Smith/Stewart.

Photos: Hyjdla Kosaniuk.

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