The Skinny Showcase: It's Our Playground

Based in Glasgow, It’s Our Playground is the curatorial project of French artists Camille le Houezec & Joey Villemont (b.1986).

It’s Our Playground’s versatile website is at the same time a portfolio and an artist run space on the internet. In its projects, IOP pursue reflection around the modes of presentation, display and exhibition, using text and suggestive means to add insight to their work.

The website’s homepage overcomes the ’limiting’ constraints of a physical exhibition space. That practice comes from a daily exploration of the endless ’reserves’ of the internet and the collection of documents (reproductions of works, found images, texts, videos, etc.), accumulated on computers. This practice simultaneously requires the need to organise knowledge, classify and compare findings to tell new stories. Considering its context, the homepage is an immaterial and playful exhibition space that takes the internet’s inherent qualities (easy access, fast and almost free), to produce unexpected narratives, reversing the hierarchy between pieces.

In a more physical world, IOP projects may take the form of sculptures, exhibitions or installations, using curation itself as a medium. In DOVBLE TROVBLE, a recent show they curated at CCA and online, they explored the results of the influence of daily internet use in young artists’ practices.

In the past year they have opened the curatorship to other practitioners like French art critic Timothée Chailloux, and soon Aurélien Mole will be curating a show in collaboration with a project by Candice Jacobs at Thoresdby Street, Nottingham.

They are currently working towards the new programme of Studio Warehouse Gallery, which starts in September 2012.

”For this Showcase, we decided to pay tribute to those anonymous images accumulated on our hard drives. Those ‘internet found’ images that can sometimes be the starting point of a project and which, combined with artists' works of art, make IOP's specificity.

”They are symptomatic of the remarkable dissemination of images on the web. Appearing beyond the acknowledged non-differentiaton between low-brow and high brow, they symbolise the “Hey Bro” of the iconic vitality of our recent years and the ones to come.”

– It's Our Playground