Benjamin Irritant and Neil Childs met in the early 1990s and began to exhibit works together at the time. Some 30 odd years later they have chosen to bring their work together for a joint exhibition at Praxis this September.
Every structure, system and story eventually needs a way out. Exit Strategies brings together sculpture and installation with print and street art to suggest the possibilities for leaving — a space, a narrative, a way of being, a set of ideas — and considering what gets left behind in the process.
Working in dialogue rather than in parallel, the two practices meet at their edges. One artist builds physical thresholds: structures that lean, distort, or fracture, occupying the gallery the way a body occupies a doorway, caught mid-motion, unresolved. The other works in the language of the street, brought indoors: layered prints, stencils and fragments of signage that carry the residue of public space; its urgency, its impermanence, its refusal to stay put.
Together, the works don't offer resolution so much as routes — some direct, some circular, some that double back on themselves. An exit is rarely a clean line; it's negotiated, improvised, sometimes abandoned. Exit Strategies treats that negotiation as the subject itself, attempting to stage the gallery as a space of transition rather than arrival.
Private view Thursday 17th September 6pm - 8pm
Open weekdays by appointment, weekends 11am - 4pm