The life studio is an obscure area of tolerance, a zone of sexish work, which cannot utterly escape the regimes of power that circumscribe it, but which can slowly corrupt them from within. In the life studio, malfunction serves as a countermeasure to power, and is signalled by a reflexive and socially immodest behaviour—the yawn. The disconcerting physical abandon that accompanies yawning ruptures the artifice of the artist/model exchange, and entangles desire, distortion and the fractious capacity of malfunction. Blenching, veiling, shuddering, twitching, moaning and sighing—yawning is a subversive gesture, a fugitive gesture, loaded with productive potential. This is the second drawing show by artist and lecturer William Platz at Bosz Gallery in which the pantomime and portrayal of yawning has been employed in ongoing investigations of malfunction, silence, transgression, mortality, infectiousness and the sexish.
The exhibition consists of two new series of works from 2016 titled Taste of Yawning and Prevention of Yawning, accompanied by a large drawing on carbon fibre titled Sexish Yawning No. 2. For this work, the artist acknowledges his indebtedness to the Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon and the 1907 film Le Bailleur (Pathé).
Exhibtion Opening: 17th June, 6:30pm
