Expedition exhibition to open at the pavilion

At 5pm, Simon Patterson will stage Seascape, a temporary public spectacle on the sea outside the De La Warr Pavilion in partnership with the Bexhill Sailing Club.

People often make sense of the world through language, maps, museological classifications, military codes and routines, Simon Patterson manipulates these mechanisms, shifting our perceptions as a result.

Safari combines works from the last 25 years of Patterson’s career with two new commissions.

This exhibition takes the visitor on a mini safari through the DLWP where they will encounter, interspersed with Patterson’s own work, objects drawn from Bexhill and Hastings Museums. These objects include artefacts collected by Hastings resident Annie Brassey (1839-87), an English writer and traveller who amassed an extensive collection of ethnographic objects during her voyages around the world on her steam yacht, the Sunbeam.

Patterson’s display will also include several rather more questionable objects, such as those relating to the notorious Piltdown man, Grey Owl and other fraudsters, charlatans and fantasists.

For the De La Warr Pavilion, and working in conjunction with the Bexhill-on-Sea Sailing Club, the artist will stage a temporary public spectacle entitled Seascape.

On the occasion of the exhibition’s opening, the club will stage a ‘sea battle’ during which coloured smoke grenades will be set off – a daytime display that references the way that artists were commissioned in the 17th and 18th centuries to design spectacles, including mock battles and firework displays, for their patrons.

This will be the fifth incarnation of ‘Landskip’, originally commissioned for ‘Art in the Park’ at Compton Verney on 2000.

Escape Routine is the first work visitors encounter on entering the gallery.

In this video, flight attendants alternately demonstrate in-flight safety procedures and feats of escapology, while a smooth voiceover reads extracts from Harry Houdini’s writings on magic and stagecraft.

Meanwhile, Manned Flight, a man-lifting kite inscribed with the name of the first person in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, will be positioned in the De La Warr Pavilion’s iconic north staircase, visible from outside. The exhibition will run until September 3.