P. Staff | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Patrick Staff 13 March 1987 (age 36) UK |
| Education | Goldsmiths University of London |
| Known for | Installations, Performance Art and New Media |
| Notable work | In Ekstase, On Venus, Weed Killer. |
| Website | pstaff |
P. Staff (born 1987 in Bognor Regis, UK) is a contemporary visual and performance artist.
P. Staff was born in 1987 in Bognor Regis, UK. They studied art at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 2009. They also participated in the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London in 2011. [1] They are currently based in Los Angeles, California and London, UK. [2]
Staff makes film installations, performance art, and new media works.
Staff's work has been described as incisive, violent and erotic [3] . Curator Elena Filopovic writes of Staff's work:
"It was the Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann who once wrote: “I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.” Staff, too, has taken this task to heart. The fires that Staff encounters are the red-hot embers of social and structural violence and ecological disasters that have become our new normal. Staff’s hand may be burnt as they write, film, and build worlds through their art, and yet, unrelentingly, their exhibition invites visitors to step closer to the fire: it burns images on the retina much like those that result from staring too long at the blazing ball of fire and gas that is the sun—gorgeous, but it hurts." [4]
Writer and filmmaker Juliet Jacques describes Staff's site-specific exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, “On Venus,” as the following:
“Staff’s site-specific exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, ‘On Venus’, deals with biopolitics, looking at the ways in which exchanges between bodies, ecosystems and institutions affect human consciousness and behaviours – especially for queer, trans and non-binary people. A new video work, also entitled On Venus, features two sections: the first presents warped archival footage of industrial farming for the production of meat, fur and hormones; the second features a poem about life on the uninhabitable planet Venus, conjuring a state of near-death that has parallels with trying to survive as a queer person in a heteronormative world. The surrounding installation impinges on the gallery itself, confronting entrants with a gargoyle weathered by acidic rain, a symbol of the worsening climate crisis, harshly lit against a reflective floor. The defamiliarizing effect of Staff's intervention rubs up against the history of the building, which was originally used as a gunpowder store. Pipes suspended from the ceiling leak acid into steel barrels, at once evoking chemical corrosion, the sharing of bodily fluids, and the uncontrollable, networked spread of viruses and data.” [5]
Elizabeth Karp-Evans writes:
“Staff’s work also seeks to address the ecological and industrial relationships that societies have become dependent on; the question of how technology and capitalist-driven consumption have changed our biological constitution is one they are interested in answering. “We’re in a moment of reckoning with the irreversible effects of contemporary biopolitics,” Staff says. In 2017, they created the video installation Weed Killer, commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles. The piece examines the complexities of treatments like chemotherapy—a poison used as a cure. “It feels like everything channels through the body at the moment—the opioid crisis, our economic collapse. We have to reckon with these things through what passes through us,” says Staff. “I’m not interested in physical purity but I am interested in what I am a conduit for, and leading with that type of somatic inquiry.”” [6]
Staff is the recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Artists (2015), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019) and has held residencies at FD13 Residency for the Arts (2018), LUX (2014), The Showroom (2014), Fogo Island Arts (2012), and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2010). [7]
Staff has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2023) [8] ; Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); [9] Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); [10] Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2019); LUMA Westbau, Zürich, Switzerland (2019); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); [11] Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2016); Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015); The Showroom Gallery, London, UK (2014); and Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2012).
Group exhibitions featuring work by Staff have been held at The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Milk of Dreams, Italy (2022) [12] ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2019); ICA London, UK (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); [13] New Museum, New York (2017); [14] Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2014); Maison Populaire, Paris, France (2012); and Whitstable Biennale, UK (2012). Select performances and screenings include Navel Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Queer Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal (2018); London Film Festival, London, UK (2017); Outfest, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2016); and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (2014).
They are represented by the gallery Commonwealth and Council.
Staff's work can be found in the permanent collections at the Tate Modern, among others. [15]
Staff has collaborated with artist Candice Lin since 2010. Their collaboration focuses on herbal practices and queer potentials. Together, their work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Gasworks, London; Teoretica, Costa Rica; Centro Para Os Assuntos Da Arte E Arquitectura, Portugal; 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles; and as part of Witchy Methodologies at the ICA, London, 2017 and the Serpentine Galleries’ Transformation Marathon, 2015. [16]
Staff identifies as transgender and uses the pronouns they/them. [17]
Anya Gallaccio is a British artist, who creates site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter.
Langlands & Bell are two artists who work collaboratively. Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, began collaborating in 1978, while studying Fine Art at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, from 1977 to 1980.
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Eva Rothschild RA is an Irish artist based in London.
Anri Sala is an Albanian contemporary artist whose primary medium is video.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British painter and writer, of Ghanian heritage. She is best known for her portraits of imaginary subjects, or ones derived from found objects, who are painted in muted colors. Her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the Black figure. Her paintings often are presented in solo exhibitions.
Enrico David is an artist based in London. He works in painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, at times employing traditional craft techniques. In the 1990s he garnered acclaim for creating monumental embroidered portraits using sewn canvases, which often began as drawings and collages from fashion magazines. During the past several years David focused on sculpture in a variety of media and returned to more traditional methods of painting. His recent works include large-scale portraits of deeply psychological meaning. Drawing continues to be an important element of his practice.
Oliver Payne and Nick Relph are British artist-filmmakers who have collaborated since 1999. Payne was born in 1977, and Relph in 1979. Both studied at Kingston University, London. Payne failed his undergraduate Intermedia course in 2000, and Relph was "booted out" the same year. Curator and critic Matthew Higgs promoted their work and included them in group exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery (2000) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (2001) in London. Since then, they have had solo exhibitions in national museums including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2004) and the Serpentine Gallery (2005). According to Artforum, they are "the unanimously hailed first new kids of the post-YBA moment."
Haim Steinbach is an Israeli-American artist, based in New York City. His work consists of arrangements of everyday objects, presented in “Displays” and shelves of his own making.
Paul Sietsema is a Los Angeles–based American artist who works primarily in film, painting and drawing. His work addresses the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, reflecting his interest in the possibility of an artwork to mediate information or meaning in a way that engages with the aesthetics of a specific time period. In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics. He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve. In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual. Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity.”
Yutaka Sone is a contemporary artist who works in Belgium, China, and Mexico.
Jordan Wolfson is an American visual artist who lives in Los Angeles. He has worked in video and film, in sculptural installation, and in virtual reality.
Yan Xing is an artist known for performance, installation, video and photography. He grew up in Chongqing and currently lives and works in Beijing and Los Angeles.
Alia Syed is an experimental filmmaker and artist of Welsh-Indian descent.
Athanasios Argianas is a Greek and British artist living and working in London, England. Argianas' practice is interdisciplinary; incorporating sculpture, painting, text, performance and often music or sound, and concerns itself with metaphorical or translated representations of aural experiences. He received his MA from Goldsmiths College, London and previously studied under Jannis Kounellis at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Simon Denny is a contemporary artist based in Berlin. He represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Since 2018 he is a professor for time based media at the HFBK Hamburg.
Won Ju Lim is a Korean American artist. She currently divides her time between Los Angeles, CA and Boston, MA.
Eric National Mack is an American painter, multi-media installation artist, and sculptor, based in New York City.
Megan Rooney is a Canadian-born, London-based artist who creates paintings, sculptures, installations, performances and poetry. Rooney is known for integrating contrasting disciplines, such as painting, sculpture performance, into a single work. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011 and, prior to that, completed her BA at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her work has been shown in solo museum exhibitions at the Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2020–21); Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2020); and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019).
