TJ Wilcox Hiding in Plain Sight

At Davies Street, TJ Wilcox presents his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Hiding in Plain Sight.

The exhibition centres a film portrait of Anglo-Irish heiress and established designer Eileen Gray, delving into an important period of personal artistic transformation in her life story when she produced a gesamtkunstwerk in the form of a home, called E-1027, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The architectural project was in part inspired by Gray’s partner, Jean Badovici, as he challenged her by asking, “Why don’t you build?”. Wilcox was given permission to use a newly discovered projection space – that was hiding in plain sight for 100 years – as a set in the making of his film, where for the first time in the history of the house it was “activated,” or “switched on,” like a lamp designed by Gray, waiting for a century to be illuminated.

Wilcox’s film explores and employs themes Gray associated with the house at the time, inviting the gallery viewer to consider – via video documentation of this unique screening event and related biographic material – a multi-channel video installation which explores one woman’s non-heroic, personal interpretation of modernism, and her proposition that (architectural) “formulas are nothing, life is everything.”