BL CK B X: Gentlemen
Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

18 April, 2018
– 12 May, 2018
Wed-Sat, 12pm-5pm
LUX
Waterlow Park Centre
Gentlemen, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, 2003.

LUX presents Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s video work Gentlemen (2003) as part of the BL CK B X series of free monthly exhibitions of artists’ moving image at LUX. The exhibition coincides with the opening of Ian White: Any Frame is a Thrown Voice at Camden Arts Centre (19 April – 24 June 2018), a retrospective exhibition of work by the late Ian White who features as lead vocalist in Payne and Relph’s video.
Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Gentlemen, 2003, video, sound, 28mins
Courtesy the artists and Herald St, London.

“[Gentlemen] is a film about youth culture and how it inhabits public space in a city. The artists use public toilets as a metaphor for their grievance with corporate intervention into youth culture. They say that they are ‘places where you find private behaviour in a public environment. They can be completely ordinary, just somewhere to go to the loo, or they can be sexual spaces. They’re very theatrical.’ (Nick Relph, interviewed in Frieze, p.70.) The work is dominated by iridescent abstract images, which the artists shot in and around Carnaby Street, a neighbourhood that was the epitome of Swinging London in the 1960s but that now stands for global brand marketing and the decay of urban culture as a result of tourism.”

–Anna Bright, May 2005, Tate


This exhibition is part of the programme CRUISING GROUND II (CGII), a continuation of LUX’s 2017 programme CRUISING GROUND, in collaboration with CRUSEV, which engaged with the 50th anniversary of the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, taking the ponds and cruising areas of LUX’s neighbouring Hampstead Heath as a departure point to explore the geographic and cultural landscape of LUX. CRUISING GROUND II features a public programme of screenings, performances, workshops, and writing, and culminates with the launch of a newly commissioned work by artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay.

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