George Henry Longly
We All Love Your Life
June 9–July 31, 2016
Red Bull Studios New York
220 W 18th St.
New York, NY 10011
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday noon–7pm
redbullstudiosnewyork.com
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Red Bull Studios New York is proud to present We All Love Your Life, the first US solo exhibition of London-based artist George Henry Longly. On view from June 9 until July 31, the exhibition reconfigures Red Bull Studios New York into a series of disorienting, obliquely formal and technological references. As viewers traverse the gallery, they encounter a variety of experiences alluding to subjectivity in outer space, to the coexistence of classical and digital orders, to self-help and reality television, to seeing the earth from space—to space-age subjectivity.
We All Love Your Life germinated from A House in Space, a book about NASA’s Skylab space station written by journalist Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr. in 1976. By matching the existential thrill of viewing Earth from a floating vantage that is moving through space with quotidian details pertaining to diet, clothing, and daily routine, A House in Space portrays a world that is exceptional and banal, unique and universal. Longly sets up a structure where the power relations between ground control and the space station are examined—played out through a narrative that includes a public artwork in space and an onsite performance venue housed within the space station.
Refracting the lens through which viewers watch everything from men walking on the moon to cooking food in front of a live studio audience, We All Love Your Life is a thrilling mix of surveillance and exhibitionism, astral focus and deep parallax. A tightly cropped film of snakes slipping across a studio desk; a mutated Dionysus, based on a three-dimensional scan of an Elgin Marble; a web camera and a bedroom: these subjects and settings of We All Love Your Life invert the commonplace and the phenomenal—a spatial reorganization that refers back to the astronauts’ experience aboard Skylab. In the absence of gravity, “local-vertical” orientation between floor and ceiling, up and down, cease to matter. As this most basic binary erodes, it takes with it other structural divisions that once ordered our lives: personal and public space, times and sites devoted to work and leisure, individual and collective subjectivities, the seeing and the seen.
About George Henry Longly
George Henry Longly works with sculpture, video, music and performance. Recent solo exhibitions include; The Smile of a Snake, Valentin, Paris (2016); Volume Excess, Koppe Astner Glasgow (2015); The Moving Museum, Istanbul (2014); Hair Care, Jonathan Viner, London (2014); GHL, Park Nights / Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); Pleats Please, Hanway Place, London (2013). He has been included in the group exhibitions; The Boys, The Girls and The Political, Lisson Gallery London (2015); Septic Finger, Kostyal, Stockholm (2015); Adventures in Bronze, Clay and Stone, Icastica Arezzo, Italy (2015); British Summer, Elizabeth Dee, New York (2015); The Crack-Up, ROOM EAST, New York (2015); A Journey Through London Subculture, ICA (off-site) (2013), London; Reading the Surface, David Zwirner, London (2013); Abstract Cabinet, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2013); Prodigal in Blue, Laura Bartlett, London (2013); and Managing Bounces, Cell project space, London (2013).
About Red Bull Studios New York
Red Bull Studios New York is a multidisciplinary contemporary art space. Recent projects include BIO:DIP, a two-part exhibition composed of large-scale solo projects by Hayden Dunham and Nicolas Lobo curated by Neville Wakefield (2016); Scenario in the Shade by Justin Lowe, Jonah Freeman, and Jennifer Herrema (2015); NEW INC: End-Of-Year Showcase presented in collaboration with the New Museum (2015); Alone Together by Ryder Ripps (2015); Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior, a group exhibition curated by Phong Bui and The Brooklyn Rail Curatorial Projects (2014); Living: An Exhibition by Peter Coffin (2014); and DISown: Not for Everyone a group exhibition including Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Bjarne Melgaard, Jon Rafman, Carissa Rodriguez, Simon Fujiwara, Antoine Catala, Dora Budor, GCC, Arunanondchai, Nicolas Fernandez, Shanzhai Biennial, Anne de Vries, Timur Si-Qin, Katja Novitskova, Leilah Weinraub, Telfar, and HBA by art collective DIS and curator Agatha Wara (2014).
