Disclaimer

IBID Projects, London

18 March - 1 May 2005         
Opening: 17 March, 6 – 8pm

IBID Projects is pleased to announce Disclaimer, an exhibition of recent work by Carey Young, which was commissioned and first shown by the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 2004. Young’s work has become recognised for its investigation into the increasing incorporation of the personal and public domains into the commercial realm. Disclaimer presents new text and video works which explore the connections between legal disclaimers and notions of negative space.

In our increasingly litigious society, disclaimers are often seen at the end of emails or on websites and allow an author, publisher or organisation to protect themselves by automatically renouncing responsibility for their own actions or statements. Disclaimers represent an act of imagination in which a problem has been foreseen, and then a protective legal structure created so that the disclaimer-user is protected. Disclaimers are contracts that make individual citizens powerless players in a legal performance that may be enacted in the future. They have a time-based, choreographic aspect, in that they delineate and create stoppages within possible future action.

Carey Young has developed four works around this theme.For Disclaimer Young has collaborated with Massimo Sterpi, a notable intellectual property lawyer and art law expert, to create an edition of three disclaimer panels which playfully use a legal precision to destabilise the relationships between artwork, viewer, artist and exhibition context. The fourth work, Terms and Conditions (2004), is a short video which features a be-suited female presenter speaking direct to camera in a welcoming tone whilst standing in an idyllic agricultural landscape, replete with references to the painterly landscape tradition. Her speech appears to discuss the ‘site’ but the text is actually a composite of disclaimers from corporate websites. In the rural setting, the speech seems both absurd and curiously apt. 

Note to Editors
Carey Young (born 1970, US/UK citizen) graduated from the Royal College of Art, London (MA in Photography) in 1997. This is her first solo exhibition in London since 2001. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1997, most notably in solo shows at John Hansard Gallery (2001), Index, Stockholm (2004), and in group shows such as Beck's Futures (ICA, 2003), A Short History of Performance, Part II (Whitechapel Gallery, 2003) and Exchange and Transform, Kunstverein Munich (2002.) Her works are held in the public collections of the Arts Council England and the Centre Pompidou. Forthcoming exhibitions include Work/Labor (Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck),  
Trade Show (Mass MOCA, Massachusetts) and Critical Societies (Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe.) She lives and works in London. More information on her work can be found at www.careyyoung.com

Massimo Sterpi, born 1966, is a lawyer and partner of Studio Legale Jacobacci e Associati in Turin/Rome.

IBID Projects
210 Cambridge Heath Road Unit 4 London E2 9NQ UK
tel/fax:+44 (0)208 983 4355
www.ibidprojects.com