No Parts To Leave Yard Without Payment

Exhibition with work by Jo Dennis

Curated by Trine Stephensen

Peckham 24 May, 2019

London’s many independent car yards exist on the margins of our daily lives.  They inhabit typically ramshackle spaces on the city’s edges and wastelands. In this new body of work, Jo Dennis pays homage to George’s car workshop situated on the Old Kent Road behind the artist’s studio. The yard has been sold to a developer and will be disassembled later this year to make way for new flats. These places of labour and human endeavour are integral to the richness of London communities. But they are vulnerable to the continuous creep of regeneration which pushes small businesses out - a cycle which is witnessed and mirrored by artists who are in the same position. Dennis’ images are layered, painted onto directly and some will be displayed under Ultra Violet light.

exhibition catalogue:

The conversation that instigated the publication of ‘Five Folds & Thirty Two Images of a Yard’ began in 2018 when Jo Dennis invited Trine Stephensen to her studio and to see her recent photographic series, nominally titled ‘Yard’. These images were taken at a car workshop in South East London, and this publication is in response to this new body of work - ‘No Parts Can Leave Yard Without Payment’. Thirty-two images, made from a single image of the ‘Yard’ folded five times over - creates order and control over a place that we have no control over, and that will eventually disappear. By changing the order of what we see, a new understanding of the place is brought about. Things are made odd in their new assemblage and new forms come into existence within the folds of the image.

Publication idea: Trine Stephensen

Published by: A Corner With

Published on the occasion of Jo Dennis’ exhibition during Peckham 24, 2019, curated by Trine Stephensen.