SAMUEL DOWD & FLORIAN ROITHMAYR

HOUSE OF CARDS
2008
wood, photocopy, print, photography; variable dimensions

The work is based on the Eames Office design of the children’s game The House of Cards, produced in 1952. The images depicted on those playing cards are of what the Eameses called “good stuff”, chosen to celebrate “familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.” The six slots on each card enable the player to interlock the cards so as to build structures of myriad shapes and sizes. Our interest in this game derives from its ideological stance of a specific moment in time: what is “good stuff” in 1952 in the USA? Who decides the canon and from what angle or perspective is this edited? In a way, The House of Cards corresponds to a past present relationship often registered and inscribed in the formal and material structure of the built environment surrounding us: social, political or cultural use or abuse of space and architecture. Our interest is in the layers of meaning inscribed in the layers of forms of specific buildings and the correlations to similar or even identical forms in different contexts.

Samuel Dowd’s work encompasses sculpture, drawing, film and photography. Through such materials he explores the topography of the mirage as both a perceptual (visible) occurrence and a notional field of fluctuation or shimmer between being and object. Dowd seeks this transfiguration of form in residual cultural practices and historical movements - in archival photography, film, literature, architecture and the arts. His abiding interest lies in the figure as it relates to the construction of ideological and collective identities and power structures - the potentiality of a singular being as an (in)coherent or resistant body. This frustration of the whole - refracted geometries - connects to the moments of a system’s formation and inevitable entropic disorder, which for Dowd represent loci of possibility beyond the now: moments of future becoming.

Florian Roithmayr works with a diverse range of media including drawing, sculpture and photography. Much of his work, which is often based on the geometries of man-made traditions, can be seen as an attempted blueprint of the environment he finds himself in. He is interested in the narratives and remains of mechanisms of political and social identification and differentiation. These are moments of shifting self-conception and their symptomatic representation in cultural forms, which speak to us in some sense, which we find ourselves unable to do without, despite political culture’s proven inability to provide a structure that succeeds as a social practice.

The first collaborative project between Samuel Dowd and Florian Roithmayr took place in 2007 during a residency and subsequent presentation at Galerija Miroslav Kraljević in Zagreb.

SAMUEL DOWD (1978, Epsom, GB) graduated with an MA in Art: Visual Performance from Dartington College of Arts, Devon. His solo career runs alongside a long-standing collaborative practice with the artist-led collective SpRoUt, which he established in 2003. Recent exhibitions include Beyond the Pale Yellow Amusement Arcade at Campbell Works, London, The Space Between, at the Towner gallery, Eastbourne and Go I know not whither, seek I know not what, at Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb. He is based in London.

FLORIAN ROITHMAYR (1977, Rosenheim, G) graduated from the MA program at Goldsmiths College, London. He has exhibited, among others, at Liverpool Biennial (UK), Vilma Gold Gallery (UK), Grazer Kunstverein (AT), Galerie Neue Alte Brücke (DE), The Approach Gallery (UK), Saatchi Gallery (UK). His work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, Flash Art, Spike Art Quaterly and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He is based in London.