At Davies Street, TJ Wilcox presents his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Hiding in Plain Sight.
The exhibition centres a film portrait of Anglo-Irish heiress and established designer Eileen Gray, delving into an important period of personal artistic transformation in her life story when she produced a gesamtkunstwerk in the form of a home, called E-1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The architectural project was in part inspired by Gray’s partner, Jean Badovici, as he challenged her by asking, “Why don’t you build?”. Wilcox was given permission to use a newly discovered projection space – that was hiding in plain sight for 100 years – as a set in the making of his film, where for the first time in the history of the house it was “activated,” or “switched on,” like a lamp designed by Gray, waiting for a century to be illuminated.
Wilcox’s film explores and employs themes Gray associated with the house at the time, inviting the gallery viewer to consider – via video documentation of this unique screening event and related biographic material – a multi-channel video installation which explores one woman’s non-heroic, personal interpretation of modernism, and her proposition that (architectural) “formulas are nothing, life is everything.”
TJ Wilcox (b. 1965, Seattle) lives and works in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York (BFA 1989) and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (MFA 1995). He has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions including Gentlemen, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2017); In the Air, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan (2015); In the Air, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); The Heir & Astaire, Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland (2012); A Fair Tale & Garland One, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2005); T.J Wilcox: Garlands, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Munich (2005); Smorgasbord, MATRIX 198, UC Berkeley Art Museum (2002); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1998). Group exhibitions include Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2023); REPEATER, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2022); Ice and Fire: A Benefit Exhibition in Three Parts, The Kitchen, New York (2020); Natural Wonders: Sublime Artifice in Contemporary Art, Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford (2018); La Biennale de Lyon (2015); Lawns and Hedges, South London Gallery, London (2013); and Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009-2010). Wilcox’s films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London.