The Stage - A Photography gallery for Rockarchive (London, UK), 2018.

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Trying to trace a red thread through the history of music — from The Sex Pistols to Ariana Grande — one common denominator emerges: each of these artists has stood on a stage.
The stage, as both a site of exposure and transformation, becomes the shared space where mixed feelings — vulnerability, power, adrenaline — converge and materialise.

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In The Stage, the gallery itself becomes that site: a space that blurs the boundary between performer and audience, spectacle and observer. The stage no longer stands apart: it merges with the room that contains it.

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A semi-transparent red silicone curtain shades the boundary between interior and exterior, collapsing clear distinctions between front and back, public and private, performer and viewer. Visitors must pass through it to enter, crossing a threshold that symbolically restages the act of performance. Once inside, the curtain conceals the archive, turning the act of discovery into an intimate performance of its own.

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Suspended in the centre of the space, a timber-clad mezzanine floats like an instrument; referencing both the materiality of sound and the wooden bodies of guitars and drums. Its hanging staircase invites ascent, evoking the expectation of an audience awaiting a show. Yet here, the performers are no longer distant: the photographs — portraits of musicians across decades — occupy the same spatial plane as the visitor, hanging from rails or resting on horizontal supports.

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The result is a “tribute concert” of another kind; one in which image, space, and audience coexist. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.”

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The existing brick shell is washed in white, serving as a neutral framework — a calm enclosure that foregrounds the spectacle within. New interventions, made of raw concrete and glass, connect the facades and house essential functions (toilets, stair, and courtyard access), remaining deliberately silent and infrastructural.

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At the centre are the Corten steel panels on which the photographs are mounted with magnets — adjustable, flexible, and performative, just like the music they celebrate.
Light, too, becomes an instrument: adjustable to follow the “character” of each subject, sculpting moments of intensity and pause, rhythm and silence.

 

The Stage thus reimagines the gallery as a live environment: a site of exchange between art and life, echoing with the ghosts of countless performances.

 

Tutored by: Steve Jensen.

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