Morgan Quaintance: Available Light

10 Oct-12 Dec 2025

PV 9 Oct 2025, 6-8.30pm

Overview

Available Light is the culmination of a year-long performance and exhibition touring project which centres around a new moving image work of the same name by Quaintance. Whilst the film itself is not on show, the project is re-imagined as an expanded display exploring, through free-association methods, core themes that are present in the work.   

Notions of home, belonging, displacement, foreignness and familiarity are addressed through an interrelated selection of still photography, text, documentation and archival material, shaped by the artist’s 2024 visit to the Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, Japan. The museum is the locus for buildings of historical interest that are transported to its site and rebuilt in order to be preserved. The tension between those ideal spaces and the urban reality of rented accommodation in both Japan and the UK’s capital cities formed the conceptual centering from which the project grew. 

As such, the exhibition features Quaintance’s original images which depict scenes of domesticity, temporary accommodation and the built environment in urban Japan; offering reflections on the often unsettling yet shared realities of worldwide contemporary city life. Alongside these works, Quaintance weaves fragments of cultural production, drawing on mid-century plays, films and cinematic references that echo themes of intrusion, alienation and the fragile idea of home.  

‘Like with most of the projects I'm working on these days, I want to use this exhibition as a way to do something slightly outside of the norm. Formally speaking, I was interested in distributing display elements within the space as if the gallery interior was a kind of zine. Often exhibitions are fielded as some form of essayistic text or series of serious propositions, but I wanted to use the more anarchistic, free-associative and energetic logic of zines to help me devise placement, juxtaposition and design.' 

Morgan Quaintance, September 2025

Active since 2018, Quaintance’s multi-award-winning moving image practice is widely known for its combination of affective sound design, formal sophistication and complex subject matter. In contrast to the moving image and performance presentations that have been staged at different venues up until this point, Available Light at Chelsea Space serves as a space for dialogue and will be accompanied by a programme of talks and events to be announced.

A publication developed in collaboration with Maria Walsh, writer and Reader in Artists' Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL will accompany the exhibition. Using a loose epistolary format, Walsh and Quaintance engaged in an anecdotal and informally theoretical text and image exchange that offers another interpretative frame through which to experience the display and its themes.