When Shall We Set Sail for Happiness?
Craig Barnes
Dmitri Galitzine

July 21 – September 16 2012

‘Anywhere! Anywhere! So long as it is out of this world!’
Baudelaire

What happens when you are given the opportunity to fulfill your dreams? A year ago, artists Craig Barnes and Dmitri Galitzine were each looking for a way out of London and dreaming of a perfect place to be.  Invited to create and curate a contemporary art gallery in rural Herefordshire, they decamped.  When Shall We Set Sail For Happiness? is the artists’ response to the reality of life in a remote village and an ironic take on Baudelaire’s tale of disillusion. Utopia is rarely what it seems.

The exhibition posits the imaginary against the real. Barnes and Galitzine will show new and recent work, as well as some archival pieces. We are invited to travel with the artists as they pass through other lands and times – some near, some distant, but all equally bizarre when you stop to examine them in detail.

A conversation between the artists is suggested throughout in the way work is deployed through the gallery. Pieces by each are often paired so as to provide a commentary or additional dimension to the other’s work. In one instance, they have also imagined themselves into each other’s practice, the work offering an off-kilter interpretation and offering a conclusion to the exhibition, in the form of the question “where to next?”

Click here to see images of the show.