GENTS: A Melodrama With 2 Acts

Simon Bedwell

30.10.05 – 13.11.05 Thursday – Sunday

Private View: Sunday 30 October, 7.00–9.00 pm

The contemporary world is full of exclusions, some legally sanctioned, some with religious alibis, some so widespread that they become all but invisible. That exclusions result from discrimination on the basis of sex would seem to be universal, common to all cultures and nations in differing degrees [it's telling that it need not even be mentioned which sex is being discriminated against, which for]. The Guerilla Girls and others have brought attention to the fact that the art world reflects and perpetuates this aspect of the wider world.

For the duration of this show, Platform will host a Private Members Club, Gents, thereby enacting, with crassly metaphoric intent, the exclusions of the art world and beyond. In A Fury for God, Ruthven identifies Clubs as a nascent form of capitalism: today, some PMCs await with melancholy their first test-case under European law. So the show may also represent a farewell-in-advance, without sadness, at the imminent ushering into history of one our longest-established formal exclusions.

GENTS: A Melodrama With 2 Acts seeks to dramatise and reiterate what we all already know: that men and women experience the world differently.

Since working with BANK (b.London 1991, d.Chicago 2003), Simon Bedwell has exhibited at the ICA (Becks Futures 5, 2004), the Saatchi Gallery (Galleon, 2004), Piccadilly Underground concourse (Advertising doesn't tell Anyone Anything Anyway, 2004) and Laden Fur Nicht, Leipzig (England Their England, 2005). His first solo gallery show was in April at Ritter/Zamet, and solo shows of new work will open at Rental (Los Angeles) in November and White Columns (New York) in 2006.