Exhibiting artist Lucien Durey will perform a 15-minute suite of songs live in the North Gallery with friends Hatim Hanafi, Jeremy O'Neill, and Mark Wolf. Composed by Durey and incorporating sounds made with vases, bottles and glassware, the songs lyrically convey scenes of domesticity and urban landscape and contemplate themes of embodiment, longing and renewal.
Lucien Durey’s boundary-straddling artistic practice engages with found objects, sounds, and places. Together these offer the material for artworks that take a variety of forms—often entwined together—including sculpture, photography, song, and performance. For Edge Effects, Durey creates new work that reconsiders an act of everyday (and often gendered) labour: washing the dishes. He stretches the scale of the implements so large that handling the plates becomes an activity of almost athletic proportions, best completed with the aid of others. A three-part vocal composition accompanies the sculpture. Recorded in the artist’s backyard in an unwitnessed performance, Dishwashing Hymn is sung a capella by Durey and his friends while clothed in garments hand-sewn from found linens. Together these elements imbue an unremarkable task with expressions of joy and solemnity to become a disarmingly tender homage to the daily acts that define and describe community and care.
