Launch Pad hosted an In‑Conversation between artist, Carey Young and art historian and critic, Joan Kee on Wednesday July 15th at the London residence of Launch Pad founder, Sarah Elson.

Biographies

Carey Young is a London‑based artist working in video, photography, text and installation whose practice explores how power is staged, visualised and embodied. Her critically acclaimed recent video installations Appearance, Palais de Justice and The Vision Machine examine how gender, authority and the gaze are constructed. From portraits of female judges to an imaginary women‑led legal system and the labour of female lens‑makers, these works address the agency of the camera and question the visual regimes through which contemporary forms of power take shape. Alongside the films, her text and photographic works explore prisons, borders and speculative legal spaces, connecting law, architecture, language and the body. Curator Toby Kamps describes Young’s work as “a unique amalgam of the conceptual, documentary, and imaginary,” while Ji‑Yoon Han notes its “keen sense of abstraction, the sublime, and the immeasurable.”

Young’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including Modern Art Oxford (2023), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2010) and The Power Plant, Toronto (2009). She has exhibited in prominent group exhibitions at institutions including Jeu de Paume (Paris), MoMA PS1 (New York), New Museum (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and other leading museums and biennials. Her work is held in museum collections including Tate, Centre Pompidou and Dallas Museum of Art. She is Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Joan Kee is a contributing editor to ArtForum, a leading specialist in the intersections of art and law, and the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Drawing on her influential book Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post‑Sixties America, she examines how legal frameworks enable artworks to function as social and political forces. Her other award‑winning publications, including The Geometries of Afro Asia, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, expand the methodological and geopolitical horizons of the field.

About Launch Pad

Established in 2014 by patron and collector, Sarah Elson, Launch Pad is a privately funded non-profit art platform based in London. Initially focused on commissioning site specific works for Elson’s private residence, the programme has since expanded to host commissions in New York and Shanghai. In addition to Launch Pad, Elson has established an International Artist Residency at Princeton University where she serves on the Advisory Council of the museum, and a fellowship for UK-based craft artists at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, where she served on the board. In 2017, Launch Pad LaB, an artists’ residency program, was established in Charente, France, with fellow patron and collector, Veronique Parke. In 2020, Launch Pad initiated a Conversation series bringing together artists and practitioners from different disciplines with mutual interests and intersecting lines of enquiry.