Grennan and Sperandio will be working with Towneley Hall, Burnley
(Jan '11 - Dec '11)
Towneley Hall
Grennan and Sperandio will be working with Towneley Hall over 12 months, during this time they will research and reflect upon objects in the collections of Townley Hall. During the same period, they will similarly research and reflect upon the mass of material culture that supports and creates social life in contemporary Burnley. The artists will produce seven new artworks that literally bring together objects from the collection and items either discovered through the social networks of contemporary Burnley or commissioned by Grennan & Sperandio from manufacturers in the town.
About the artists
“Mr Grennan and Mr Sperandio tweak our notion of what art is and who it is for.”
Roberta Smith, New York Times
Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio met at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1988 and have worked together exclusively as a team since 1990. Grennan works from north Wales, and Sperandio works from Houston, Texas.
Two things remain constant in their practice: they always work together and their work invariably involves the authorial or editorial participation of other people – other members of the public. Their work often utilizes media that are culturally compromised: chocolate, comic books and television, appearing at social sites of consumption in the home and store and on the street.
They are best known for working with the unionized employees of a Chicago chocolate factory to mass produce a new chocolate bar with Sculpture Chicago program ‘Culture in Action’ (1993), for making and distributing collaboratively-made comic books in partnership with DC Comics, Fantagraphics Books and others (1995, continuing) and for the creation of two U.S. reality television series, ‘Artstar’ and ‘Artstar II’ (2006, 2008). Grennan & Sperandio worked with Colin de Land, American Fine Arts Company, from 1995. They are often seen as part of a critical history of artists whose work is focused on social narrative and social exchange. Over the last twenty years, this history of practice has been described as ‘interventionist’, ‘New Genre’, and ‘Relational’. In 2010, Bucharest Biennial curator Felix Vogel chose the term ‘handlung’ (‘acting together’) to describe the social turn in this approach to practice.
http://kartoonkings.com/
Towneley Hall
Towneley Park
off Todmorden Rd
Burnley
BB11 3RQ
Tel: 01282 424213
