Interview with Paul Carter

13/09/16

Interview: Paul Carter

Paul Carter: Municipal

CPG London

17 August - 25 September 2016

As the title of this immersive exhibition, Municipal, filled with quasi-architectural sculptural installations, suggests, its artist Paul Carter is interested in ideas of communality and civic architecture. Building on the notion that his studio – and, indeed, the gallery space and all communal spaces around us – is a hotel, or a kind of social sculpture, in which people are invited to come together and connect in their isolation, his installations reference public buildings and often quite Communist architecture, considering their functionality and dysfunctionality as places of social exchange.

Here, a lift stands centrally, opening and closing at timed intervals. Visitors may enter it, press the buttons, and wait to be transported to another place. Where or what this place might be like, only their imaginations can tell. They may, of course, also walk around the outside of this object, a view they never normally would get, opening up a liminal space, a place of division. Carter, who suffers from claustrophobia and never uses a lift himself, enjoys watching people interact, or standing waiting for “residents” to appear. He describes his phobia as coming from “a sculptural sensibility of space”, and this sensibility resonates throughout his work. The “piss corners”, recreating abandoned walls of buildings where men give dysfunction a new use, line the left-hand-side of the main gallery space, inviting visitors in, while, perhaps, once they recognise the reference, repelling them at the same time.

A film plays in the background, showing a man destroying his down-filled puffa jacket – feathers flying everywhere, a gesture of despair and isolation, almost soundless, “a crisis of materiality” as the subject seeks to understand his place within a municipal structure – a municipal society. An everyman, or a resident in the municipal hotel, who travels in the motionless lift, and pisses between stained yellow plexiglass frames.

Watch the interview here