Trouble with Them
Talulah Miers, Daniella Norton, Betty O’Connell-Rogers, Daniel Pryde-Jarman, Clare Sheppeard, Mike Stokes, Joshua Uvieghara, Alice White
29 July – 12 September 2022
Founded by Daniel Pryde-Jarman and Alice White in 2006, the Grey Area gallery managed to exist in its underground location for six-and-a-half years independent of any official funding sources – an extraordinary achievement in light of its innumerable exhibitions and various collaborations. For the third exhibition in our current programme, Gallery DODO has invited the Grey Area to host a show ten years, almost to the day, after it finally closed its doors.
Announcing its imminent closure in August 2012, the Grey Area wrote this prophetic note to accompany the final show, ‘Vacation Grey Area’:
“After a heady 6.5 years of productive basement-dwelling, Grey Area has made the difficult decision to vacate the subterranean premises of 31 Queens Rd, Brighton. Bleary-eyed we emerge, vowing to return on a day not so distant, and in a form as yet unknowable.”
The form in which it returns at Gallery DODO is that of the two founding artists and a collection of its steering committee. Borrowing the title of the first show at Grey Area, ‘Trouble With Them’ proposes to revisit the original ethos of the gallery with the unavoidable hindsight of a decade’s development in the artists’ practices.
Grey Area (2006 – 2013) was an independent artist-run space in the centre of Brighton. Established in a dilapidated basement in March 2006, Grey Area produced over 50 exhibitions and numerous other experimental contemporary art events in an idiosyncratic project space.
Grey Area, formerly of 31 Queens Rd Brighton, East Sussex . Archive website: https://www.greyarea.gallery/
Gallery DODO 