At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere

Workplace and Gathering are delighted to present At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere, an ambitious solo exhibition of large-scale sculpture, installation, and wall-based work by Simeon Barclay, collaboratively shown across both galleries.

Each gallery will feature paintings from the same wall-based acrylic series, drawing an explicit continuity between the overlapping exhibitions. Set against a striking black background, cropped and edited film stills from Hedi Slimane's Celine Autumn/ Winter 23 fashion campaign depict models projecting an effortless nonchalance behind sunglasses, a sight that both absorbed and repelled the artist due to their layer of impenetrability. To further explore this tension, Barclay has intervened into the surface with vinyl and painted canvas, creating colourful abstract blocks akin to the work of Matisse as a gesture towards deconstruction, fandom and appropriation.

At Workplace, a metal railing skirts around the darkened basement, where a series of neon text works held within semi-transparent bins illuminate the space. Visitors, kept at a slight remove by the barrier, can wander through the haunting atmosphere of the environment. A film installation projects handheld footage into the gallery to fill the space with emergency strobe lights, evoking an elusive sense of danger at night, whilst upstairs a fabricated weightlifting rack is adorned with strange and familiar sculptural elements, invoking the notion of strength as a defence mechanism. Here, Barclay’s references to public architecture, institutions of control and tools for individual optimisation gestures towards the privatisation of urban space, where access to public areas is contingent upon private forces and reduces the agency of passers-by, often made indirectly visible due to the presence of sentinels and physical barriers. The silence of the film along with the ambiguity of the weightlifting rack further underscores this sense of what is stated and unstated, what is seen and unseen.