13/09/16
Interview: Paul Carter
Paul Carter: Municipal
CPG London
17 August – 25 September 2016
As the title of this immersive exhibition, Municipal,
filled with quasi-architectural sculptural installations, suggests, its artist
Paul Carter is interested in ideas of communality and civic architecture. Building
on the notion that his studio – and, indeed, the gallery space and all communal
spaces around us – is a hotel, or a kind of social sculpture, in which people
are invited to come together and connect in their isolation, his installations
reference public buildings and often quite Communist architecture, considering
their functionality and dysfunctionality as places of social exchange.
Here, a lift stands centrally, opening and closing at
timed intervals. Visitors may enter it, press the buttons, and wait to be
transported to another place. Where or what this place might be like, only
their imaginations can tell. They may, of course, also walk around the outside
of this object, a view they never normally would get, opening up a liminal
space, a place of division. Carter, who suffers from claustrophobia and never
uses a lift himself, enjoys watching people interact, or standing waiting for “residents”
to appear. He describes his phobia as coming from “a sculptural sensibility of
space”, and this sensibility resonates throughout his work. The “piss corners”,
recreating abandoned walls of buildings where men give dysfunction a new use,
line the left-hand-side of the main gallery space, inviting visitors in, while,
perhaps, once they recognise the reference, repelling them at the same time.
A film plays in the background, showing a man
destroying his down-filled puffa jacket – feathers flying everywhere, a gesture
of despair and isolation, almost soundless, “a crisis of materiality” as the
subject seeks to understand his place within a municipal structure – a municipal
society. An everyman, or a resident in the municipal hotel, who travels in the
motionless lift, and pisses between stained yellow plexiglass frames.
Watch the interview here