and in and out of weeks

Workplace is delighted to present and in and out of weeks, a group exhibition of work by three artists: James Cabaniuk, b chehayeb and Rafael Pérez Evans, who each explore their relationship to place, time, memory, intersectionality, trauma, and escape through processes of introspection and investigation. 

In Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, the protagonist Max is banished to his bedroom by his parent where, in his confinement, he enters the temporal and spatially dissonant world of his imagination, voyaging ‘in and out of weeks’ to reach a fantastical island of cannibalistic monsters that threaten to devour him. Upon conquering them, he commands them to engage in a tumultuous ‘wild rumpus’ before he returns home for his dinner. Steeped in psychoanalytic theory Sendak’s story is an allegory of the human capacity to confront and navigate trauma and intense emotional responses to the world, and how they may be processed and overcome through world-building, psychological fantasy, and imaginative journeying. The artists in the exhibition each purposefully traverse problematic complexities of the external world and their relationship to it, responding through delving into atemporal, fantastical or visionary worlds.