Second Shift

Friday 11 September - Friday 02 October

Excelsior Studios, NW10 6JP

Luca Levai · Brooke Fitzsimons · Regan Boyce · Matthew Black · Dorothea Magonet · Maria Gonzalez · Erin van de Graaff · Harry Hancock

Every industrial landscape produces more than it intends to.

Alongside finished products exists another material economy: shrink wrap caught in chain-link fences, warped pallets stacked behind loading bays, fractured panes of glass, cable ties, bent steel, anonymous fragments of plastic and cardboard softened by rain. Not quite rubbish, not quite resource, these objects occupy an uncertain space beyond production, suspended between function and abandonment. They form the accidental architecture of industry: a second landscape that exists in the margins of the first.

Second Shift begins there.

Working across sculpture, painting and installation, this exhibition invites artists to begin with the overlooked materials of Park Royal. Gathered from its streets, yards, workshops and forgotten edges, these industrial remnants become collaborators rather than subjects.  Second Shift is less interested in recycling than in re-reading. If Marcel Duchamp asked whether an ordinary object could become art, Second Shift asks what happens when materials that have slipped outside the logic of production are returned to circulation with their histories still intact.

Every material already contains a script. Plastic remembers moulds and pressure. Steel remembers heat. Timber records seasons long before it becomes a pallet. Even the most anonymous object carries the invisible imprint of manufacture, labour, logistics and use. Rather than erasing these histories, the artists work with them – dismantling, misreading and redirecting the intelligence already embedded within industrial matter. Objects are not stripped of meaning but asked to perform differently.

Like Gordon Matta-Clark cutting through buildings to expose the structures hidden beneath their surfaces, or Isa Genzken revealing the strange psychological lives of the materials that make up contemporary cities, the works assembled here pull apart the familiar grammar of the industrial landscape. Things are disassembled, translated and recomposed. Their mechanisms become visible. Their associations loosen. Their potential expands.

Park Royal is London's largest industrial estate. It is equally a landscape of continual invention, where production never entirely ends and materials are perpetually passing from one state to another. Second Shift treats this restless material ecology not as background but as medium. The exhibition proposes that every industrial process produces an afterlife alongside its products – and that artists are uniquely equipped to inhabit that space.

Nothing here is simply found. Everything has changed shifts.