Giles Bailey & Jeremiah Day

Please note, the exhibition will close at 4pm on Thu 24 December, reopening at 11am on Tue 5 Jan.

CCA presents the work of two artists for whom language is a fundamental preoccupation. In the work of Giles Bailey (1981, UK) and Jeremiah Day (1974, USA), language appears not just as pictures of signs but rather poetics, narrative, description and exposition through words are integrated into visual art practice.

Giles Bailey works largely with performance, writing or strategically appropriating texts that he performs himself. These works are often conceived to propose alternative approaches to the assembling of histories and set archival footage, narrative video or particular images against experiments with language. Increasingly, he works closely with others to facilitate collaborations in order to explore these themes and is developing longer pieces of experimental writing. At the heart of these interests is an abiding preoccupation with conventions and archetypes, why they persist and how we might challenge the thinking that perpetuates them.

Jeremiah Day’s work employs photography, speech, and improvisational movement. In his performances and installations, questions of site and historical memory are explored through fractured narrative and image. In a personal and idiosyncratic form of realism, Day appropriates historical incident to serve as metaphor and exemplification, often drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt to ground this process within a kind of political argumentation.

Presented in juxtaposition and dialogue, the two complimentary but distinct practices will reflect upon each other and offer a glimpse into one of the important currents in contemporary art, namely the return of what was once unfashionable and taboo: narrative.

Giles Bailey studied at the Glasgow School of Art, Royal College of Art and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam where he received his MFA in 2011. He has presented projects at The Hepworth Wakefield, The Chisenhale Gallery, Transmission Gallery, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Basel, Etablissement d’en Face Brussels and CAGE, New York.

Jeremiah Day graduated from the art department of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997 and lived and worked in Los Angeles until moving to Holland in 2003 to attend the Rijksakademie. From 2000 to 2002, Day was artist-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles where he organised such events as The Great Silence: 10 Years After the Burning, commemorating the 1992 riots.

Giles Bailey will perform his new work The Chemical History of a Candle, and present two new publication projects on Thursday 7 January. See more event details here.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/151630871" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="https://vimeo.com/151630871">Jeremiah Day - To A Person Sitting In Darkness (#4 Helicopters)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/ccaglasgow">CCA: Glasgow</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>