For the previous seven years, the British artist-curator Lewis Teague Wright has organised artwork reveals in essentially the most transient and nondescript of areas: the common-or-garden storage unit. “Lock Up Worldwide began from of a scarcity of London artwork tasks that addressed bodily house as a curatorial curiosity in an attention-grabbing approach,” Teague Wright says. “This was in 2015, through the heyday of Peckham gentrification, and I didn’t wish to open one other artwork house that contributed to that.”
As an alternative, he rented a metal container in East London’s Hackney Wick for a month, throughout which period he held three consecutive reveals, together with one by the Canadian artist Steve Bishop that included a plastic bag filled with fungal spores that might probably assist deal with Alzheimer’s illness. The length of exhibitions is often brief—one week for a solo present and three weeks for a bunch—which supplies it a sense of urgency akin to a taking place. The listing of round 35 artists who’ve taken half over time is a mixture of cult favourites, together with the genre-bending Genesis P.Orridge, and funky and conceptually pushed makers resembling Yuri Pattison and Jack O’Brien.
Sometimes situated away from the town centre, Teague Wright enjoys that there’s a facet of voyage required to see these reveals; he wryly compares it to visiting New York’s Dia Beacon. He’s additionally within the ubiquity of the storage unit and its aesthetic. “Metal partitions and concrete will be discovered all over the place. Irrespective of the place you might be on the planet, it by no means modifications,” he says.
He has definitely had the chance to check this idea out: the mission has travelled to far-flung places together with Tokyo, Istanbul and Los Angeles. “Each time I’d fly overseas for a present I’d stage a Lock Up,” Teague Wright says. A lot of the organisation is advert hoc—works are shipped within the suitcase of pals to maintain prices down. Guests sometimes message Teague Wright to rearrange a personal viewing—including to the underground and clandestine nature of the mission. These have taken place in any respect hours and beneath all ranges of sobriety: “In Turkey I had somebody go to the present at 3am following an afterparty,” he says. “I most likely would not try this once more.”
On an financial stage, the advantages are apparent. Storage items are significantly cheaper to lease than a pop-up house, Teague Wright factors out. That is very true within the US, he says, the place you may lease a unit for $1 for the primary month—a worth sometimes provided to entice clients after which lure them right into a longer-term subscription.
And whereas the mission has since advanced to often take into account different lockable areas—resembling an deserted financial institution in Frankfurt whose lockboxes had been full of particular person artworks, or a laundry airing cage on a roof in Mexico Metropolis—the storage unit stays at its core, not least as a result of it additionally permits a pointed commentary on the mechanics of artwork accumulating. In any case, a lot of the artwork {that a} conventional gallery places on present is bought solely to be positioned in storage containers at freeports anyway, Teague Wright says: “Actually, I’m simply chopping out the intermediary.”
