LUAP presents Time Can Escape You in Gallery No.32’s Between Frames at The Factory Project during Frieze Week 2021. Across a sequence of reclaimed doors, The Pink Bear moves through successive moments as a bouquet is gradually scattered by the wind.
Read in one direction, the bouquet moves from full bloom towards bare stems. Flowers are carried away as The Pink Bear moves forward, leaving colour behind him. Because each moment occupies a separate door, the sequence unfolds through the factory yard, with the viewer moving between one state and the next.
The work gives a fleeting action physical distance. Instead of watching the change happen in real time, the viewer encounters separated moments of the same movement. Beginning and end remain present at once, and the sequence can be followed in either direction.
From bloom to bare stems, the work suggests dispersal and decay. A coherent bouquet gradually comes apart, evoking entropy through the scattering of its individual elements. Read the other way, those same images reverse themselves. Flowers gather, the bouquet reforms and decay becomes renewal.
That ambiguity is central to Time Can Escape You. The title gives the work urgency, but the Installation resists a simple one-way account of time. What appears as depletion from one direction becomes formation from another. The same sequence can hold loss and rebirth depending on where the viewer begins and how they move through it.
The reclaimed door is the shared starting point for Between Frames. Curated by Kieran Idle and Meg Stuart of Gallery No.32, the exhibition brings together 15 artists and collectives, with doors occupying the open factory yard. Developed from the suspended months of the first Covid lockdown, the exhibition considers the uncertain space between one state and another.
For LUAP, that framework is already built into the structure of Time Can Escape You. Each door holds a different state, while the physical gaps between them become part of the sequence. The viewer does not simply look at an image of change. Moving through the Installation becomes a way of experiencing it.
Between Frames forms one of ten exhibitions within The Factory Project, conceived by curators Eric Thorp and Nicholas Stavri. The wider project brings together ten curatorial partners and more than 110 artists across a 67,640 sq ft warehouse and yard complex at Thameside Industrial Estate, creating space for independent curators and artists to work on an unusually ambitious scale during Frieze Week.
Within that scale, Time Can Escape You remains economical. A bouquet can be seen dispersing or gathering, flowers becoming stems or stems returning to bloom. The work leaves the direction open, holding decay and renewal together rather than resolving one into the other.
Between Frames runs at The Factory Project, Thameside Industrial Estate, London, from 9 to 22 October 2021.
Time Can Escape You - Site Specific Instalation
