Sean Hawkridge at the Cornerstone

There’s always a danger when you provide entertainment at a private viewing that it can overshadow the actual exhibition. I won’t say that happened here on Thursday night but I do wish I knew how the card magician Joe Fawley managed to change the two cards I had in my hand into Aces, amazing.
The Cornerstone gallery at Hope University Everton Campus is an interesting building but as you can see from the picture its a gallery in both senses of the word – a balcony above a hall. Which I find distracting, step too far back and you fall down the stairs.
Sean is currently the Static Gallery Graduate Resident, and has been recommended for the British Art Show. I saw a couple of these works at Arena gallery during the biennial. They’re not pieces that you just stand and look at, some are documentary evidence of happenings or interventions in institutional systems.
It would spoil the fun if I explained the whole thing but there’s a clever idea involving posting 52 playing cards to various galleries around the world and there’s a piece recording the stages of receiving and eventual payment of a parking ticket. You are invited to follow instructions for making a paper plane (most of them glided smoothly down into the hallway) or use a phone to call one of a number of public phone boxes and chat to whatever passerby answers.
But most important of all, how did Magic Joe find my three of diamonds?