Spotlight (Male), 2006 , 43cm x 25cm

One role adopted by Denise Hawrysio’s Spotlight (Male) (2006), positioned on a lectern near the gallery’s front door, is to provide an alternative guide to the exhibition as an activity of masking, reframing and re-conceiving in such a way as to make the familiar seem quite strange.  Hawrysio has taken a surgical knife to one side of each page of a volume of a casting directors’ guide to actors and cut out each actor’s face to leave a sequence of voided profiles that act as templates to a fragmentary succession of printed matter that can then be viewed through them and that changes each time a page is turned.  This act of deletion layering and framing is an equivalent to her 15/1 curating projects since 1992, for which 15 artists are each given two days to respond to the existing condition within the gallery space and are free to change or respond to anything done by the preceding artists.  First installed at Hawrysio’s own gallery/project space Malania Basarab, it has recently been revived in London in 2004 at 1,000,000mph, and in 2005 at the Copenhagen art space Overgaden.

Andrew Wilson, curator Tate Britain, 2007
Quote from The Showroom Gallery Annual Review 2005/6

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