Barry Sykes
Solo exhibition
at Plymouth Arts Centre
14 January – 27
February 2010
Barry Sykes has been artist-in-residence at
Plymouth Arts Centre since Summer 2010. He is an artist who is unafraid of the
paradoxical, the awkward or the hard to assimilate, with sometimes absurd and
comic results. Over the last few years his practice has involved singing,
dancing, whittling, sculpting blindfolded, forgery, shoplifting, donations to
charity, and several collaborations with close friends and family. This enquiry
has also led him to veer between subjects such as memory, magic, originality,
human interaction, tourism, adhesives and his own moral compass.
For his residency, commission and exhibition at Plymouth Arts Centre Sykes is
taking the opportunity to reconsider his entire output. The galleries will a
show a ten-year retrospective of his work, a record of his recent time in
Plymouth and a focus on as yet unmade works and future ambitions. The Dad
Directives 2008 is one of his best-known works, created during a residency with
Platform in Vaasa, Finland. Each weekend of his stay Sykes emailed his father a
short instruction to take a specific A3 photograph; these were then sent out to
Finland a few days before his exhibition opened to be inserted into pre-made
frames. There were six requests in total, varying from the enigmatic ‘Hi
Dad. Take a photograph of something you don’t understand’ to the
prosaic ‘Hi Dad. What is the heaviest thing you are prepared to lift in
the house? Take it out
into the garden and photograph it.’ The final six images create an
intimate but cryptic portrait of their relationship and a careful unpicking of
the mechanics of photography in the work Sykes is also testing himself
throughout his residency time, undertaking a number of talks, lectures and
public gestures as part of his new Keep Him Talking series looking into
currency of the artist’s voice. For more details visit:
keephimtalking.blogspot.com
Barry Sykes (born 1976) lives and works
in south east London. He gained his MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and
Design and has exhibited nationally and internationally since graduating,
including Tate Modern, London; The Frieze Art Fair; ArtSway, New Forest; Chapter
Arts, Cardiff; Grizedale Arts, Cumbria; Kunstfabrik, Berlin and The Prague
Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘The Desperate Designer’
Gallop, London, 2009; 'I Was Born On The Day Heidegger Died (But I Don't
Know Much About His Work)', i-cabin, London, 2008; and ‘Tree
Hugger’, Platform, Finland, 2008. For more details visit:
www.barrysykes.info
Press enquiries: contact Hannah
Prothero, Marketing & Communications Manager, Plymouth Arts Centre, phone:
01752 276990, email: hannah@plymouthartscentre.org
Plymouth Arts Centre, 38 Looe Street, Plymouth, PL4
0EB
www.plymouthartscentre.org
01752 206114
