Occupying piccalilli simultaneously across two solo exhibitions, Back of House by Chaney Diao and Front of House by Juliusz Grabianski each construct staged environments in which bodies, objects and viewers become implicated within shifting structures of control, performance and spectatorship. In both exhibitions, mediated erotic imagery, staged domestic settings, synthetic bodily substances and scripted social encounters produce a landscape of constructed experience. Relations between performer and audience, viewer and viewed, server and consumer continuously collapse and intersect.

These dynamics emerge in Front of House during the opening night, where visitors are incorporated into a filmed live performance directed by Juliusz Grabianski. The performance further unsettles distinctions between participation and observation, extending both exhibitions’ broader consideration of authorship, spectatorship and the staging of social relations.

Back of House brings together photography and moving image works made across different moments of Chaney’s practice. The photographic works begin with found pornographic images of bodies that are often denied agency or reduced to passive skin surfaces. These images are spun, projected and re-recorded through references to the spinning rhythms of high-speed techno, while distant and partially obscured dialogue drawn from behind-the-scenes dungeon-play pornographic material circulates through the video work. The exhibition offers a critical framework to access domestic interiors and rave conditions as familiar structures through which bodies, behaviours and relations are charged by shifts in tone, scale, framing and access.

The coexistence of both Back of House and Front of House within piccalilli resists the idea of an ‘exhibition’ as a fixed or self-contained structure. Instead, both exhibitions continually interrupt and reframe one another, producing a shared environment that is shaped through overlapping conditions of staging, and constructed experience.