Daniel Eatock
An Empty Room: The Sequel

Curated by Cortney Lane Stell

An empty room is an oxymoron. For a room to exist, it must contain the things that define it as a room, such as walls, ceilings, doors, and floors. This paradox is precisely where we start Daniel Eatock’s solo exhibition, An Empty Room: The Sequel and his public lecture, “Subject to Change.”

The exhibition: All the equipment, display furniture, lighting etc., is left in position from the previous show. The architectural elements of the gallery are captioned, all photographs and exhibition announcements from the previous exhibitions are displayed and the gallery attendant hiring process is revisited. Everything is undone, yet still somehow left in its place. The revelation here is awareness, both of social constructs and the physical space.

An Empty Room: The Sequel features a dynamic, experiential staging of objects, archives, and processes that are already present at every exhibition, but are often tucked away or hidden in plain sight. An Empty Room: The Sequel is inspired by an exhibition mounted this past May in Strasbourg, France. In the preceding exhibition, the artist collaborated with a group of graphic communication students to produce a unique, mini-retrospective of his work.

The lecture: Eatock’s artistic research will take an emblematic form in a lecture performance, examining the medium of the artist/designer lecture format itself. The lecture will function as a displaced narrative performance and continuation of the exhibition to be utilized subsequently as an audio guide. Eatock’s lecture will intervene in the traditional lecture structure, in order to address the key questions of producing and framing creative knowledge.

About the artist: The impossibility of capturing a life, yet the custom of doing it anyway, is perhaps why biographies are often prescriptive. Perhaps this is also why Daniel Eatock archives versions of his biography on his website. The biographical elements presented here similarly endeavor to highlight Eatock’s accomplishments and will be added to his online bio archives.

Daniel Eatock is a British artist who takes no mind to boundaries—boundaries like those often found between art and design, commercial and art object, producer and author. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Eatock has design experience at institutions such as the Walker Art Center as well as independent ventures such as interdisciplinary art and design studio Foundation 33. Eatock’s care to systems, information, and archiving can be seen in both his monograph Imprint, published in 2008 by Princeton’s Architectural Press, and his website. His website highlights Indexibit, a widely used Content Management System and website platform designed collaboratively by Eatock and Jeffery Vaska. No matter what tool he uses and whether it’s for himself or a client, Eatock’s practice is based on exploration of the world in which he lives, orienting himself toward the practical, creating new relations to everyday objects.

The Philip J. Steele Gallery is a multidisciplinary exhibition space that exhibits national and international contemporary art. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition of work by Desirée Holman.

The Visiting Artist, Scholar, and Designer (VASD) Program brings leading practitioners and thinkers to the RMCAD campus. The next guest for the fall term is Micah White.

The Gallery and VASD Program are part of Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, a private art and design college offering online and on-ground undergraduate and graduate degrees.