Cell Project Space

Teatro Grottesco presents works by Elizabeth Wright in Cell Project Space’s reading room, adjoining office, and entryway. These intermedial spaces are used to situate the artist’s sculptures – copies of objects Wright has reduced in scale or compressed – within the everyday life of the gallery. 

 

In the 1990s, the artist reprinted telephone directories from different countries at sizes subtly smaller than their originals. When first exhibited between 1994 and 1998, phonebooks were instantly recognisable staples of home and office environments, whilst today printed directories have become virtually obsolete now that contact information is digitised. 

 

A selection of directories that Wright previously made for shows in Basel, New York City, London, and Venice are displayed for the first time together. Alongside these, Yellow Pages (1995) is installed in Cell Project Space’s office similarly to how the artist first showed the piece on a desk at Karsten Schubert in 1995. In the thirty years since, consumer technology has significantly reduced in size – epitomised by the LED flatscreen monitor and Apple Mac computer, beside which this earlier work is displayed here – while printed matter has also been compressed, most notably with the invention of the portable document format (PDF). 

 

Wright continues to use a variety of reprographic printing techniques to copy objects. Placed beneath the office desk is a new work, Under Desk Can (2026) – the artist has used 3D digital modelling software to seemingly make a crushed energy drink can appear partially decompressed. The artist has also used unlabelled aluminium cans to create Corridor Cans (2026), which are installed along the narrow entryway leading to the gallery. Designed to be encountered casually, these cans present another means of compression; this time from potentially being kicked or crushed underfoot. In this respect, the work refers to the squeeze: a process that uses paper to reverse copy epigraphs. Here, a similar yet involuntary method of printing might take place when a can comes into contact with the ground or a shoe, making an imprint on its metallic surface. 

 

Presenting her work in these settings, Wright underscores the empty gallery. By compressing the space in which her work is exhibited the artist primes the viewer and attunes the way in which one encounters objects apparently functioning in their rightful place.