An invited curator selects a singular artwork

FREE PARKING with gallery validation at Border’s Books & Music

18 January - 24 February, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday 19th 6-8pm
Hannah Rickards’ Thunder curated by Vincent Honoré

PawnShop presents Solo Solo, the first installment of the exhibition series at the gallery. Vincent Honoré has selected Hannah Rickards’ installation, Thunder (2005).

For Thunder, Rickards records a single clap of thunder and stretches it from eight seconds to seven minutes. The resulting sound is transcribed into a musical score for six instruments (flute, trumpet, trombone, cello, viola, and violin) performed, recorded and reduced back to its initial length of eight seconds.

“Selecting a single work of art for a solo presentation in a gallery in Los Angeles is a challenging gesture. I wanted the work and its display to be as radical as the project itself; an index of a broader practice. In this context, Thunder is the perfect work. For the first Solo Solo, we are presenting an empty gallery, playing with the polyphony of the word “volume.” With Thunder, we are entering a space designed as a structure of thinking, we are involved in a state of flux: an intensely simple gesture, raising in its layers notions of displacement, transience, exchange, culture, narrative, spatiality and commodity. ” -Vincent Honoré

PawnShop debuts London based Hannah Rickards to the US. Thunder was commissioned by Media Art Bath, UK. Previous presentations of Thunder include: South London Gallery, London (2006), Witte de With Contemporary, Rotterdam (2007), European Kunsthalle, Cologne (2007) and Gallery Johann König, Berlin (2007). Rickards’ group shows include New Contemporaries, Cornerhouse, Manchester / 14 Wharf Rd, London (2003), Camden Arts Centre, London (2007) with her first solo show at the Showroom, London (2007).

Vincent Honoré is an independent curator and writer based in Paris, formerly curator of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (G.N.S. and Playlist, both with Nicolas Bourriaud) and Tate Modern, London (Jeff Wall, Catherine Sullivan, Pierre Huyghe, and Learn to Read).

Recent and forthcoming projects include:

From a Distance…, Wallspace, New York, November 2007 - January 2008. Gathering ten international artists whose works are “reconsidering cultural elaborations and legacy with disillusioned, fragmentary and provisional strategies, memories and displacements.”

A Fragmented Time, 176, London, May - September 2008. For Anita Zabludowicz’s new public exhibition space, 176, he brings together more than 20 international artists whose works are “manipulating, replaying and disrupting existing structures of cultural production and are “deterritorializing perceptible experience through movements of incorporations, animations, projective transpositions, and visual translations.”

Catalogue with interviews and text available to accompany the exhibition.

Installation view, January 2008

Installation view (detail), January 2008

Installation view, January 2008