The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play) is an exhibition that explores the inherent problems of painting, authorship, display, and control, by collapsing the boundaries between studio and gallery, and forcing works into unpredictable, often uncomfortable relationships that challenge the roles of artist, curator, and the paintings themselves.
MIRROR
24/10/25 12:00–17/12/25 11:30
The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play)
Painting is an activity riven with problems. It’s fair to say that the problems are the best bits. Problems are why painting takes hold of painters for their entire lives; it’s why we can’t control or tame it. It’s why we are constantly surprised by it and it’s why paintings – despite their flat, stillness – shift and mutate in their emphasis when exhibited in different contexts, places or at different moments in time. One significant problem for paintings is their association with an intentioned author – who themself is an assimilation of experience and influence – who must then outwork their ‘ideas’ by means of a loosely controlled brush loaded in gloopy pigmented mud. Another problem is the disjuncture between the reflexive live-ness of studio-making and the calcified presentation-mode that paintings can be expected to adopt when they enter gallery exhibitions.
The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play) attempts to consider the ‘problems’ of authorship and of display by allowing the uncertainty, questioning doubt and contingency of the studio to ingress the methodology of exhibition-making. In so doing it dispenses with the given job roles of ‘artist’ and ‘curator’ and it questions the assumption that collaboration is virtuous or democratic. The tentative resolution that each painter brings to their objects as they prepare them to leave the studio is immediately given up here as these paintings are forced to butt-up against each other, hang atop one another, or become inserted into holes cut into other paintings. Under these conditions, paintings are not given the safe space of the elegant white cube but are forced to fight for their lives, to hold their own while infecting, reflecting and absorbing their neighbours’ moods, energies, strengths and weaknesses.
Including projects led by Josef Back, Freddie Bannister, Miles Graham, Dan Howard-Birt, LLE (Casper White, James Moore & Abi Birkinshaw), Ian Malhotra, Johanna Melvin, millimetre (Kate Scrivener & Finlay Taylor), Rebecca Willing and over 40 other collaborating artists!
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The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play) is a project by Dan Howard-Birt. Dan is a painter with an interest in what we do with, and about, exhibitions in this moment where we might feel that they are losing their function as the primary site for ‘art-events’ (that strange occurrence conjured between viewer and object within a controlled environment). Choosing instead to make ‘projects’ he seeks to extend the values of the studio (reflexiveness, doubt, openness, provisionality, etc) into gallery spaces, often working with other painters with shared concerns. By working this way he acknowledges studios as the primary site for ‘art-events’ whilst attempting to re-introduce its possibility back into galleries.
