Showing for one night only at Lima Zulu on February 6, London-based artist Menna Cominetti‘s Woozee (exhibition photos, top right) presented a tactual exhibition of items you can look at but can’t actually touch, past the cycle racks and in the front room of the London space. A plaster-mould backpack, dusty-blue cap, knee-pads and coffee cups lie cast and crumpled on the floor and affixed to its white walls above wooden floorboards and over hand-scrawled and reprinted gestural illustrations of hands, arms, body parts, scribbles.
It’s an act of half-delirious self-expression that the 2014 Bloomberg New Contemporaries artist produced in what Cominetti herself describes as an “ungenerous mess” of “the sculptural weight of the every day, with cartoon daydreams”. What’s ‘ungenerous’ could be interpreted as the transformation of these everyday objects and images, used and taken for granted in the groggy haze and “physicality as played out through the synthetic carry arounds we clad ourselves with around the city”.
As “an attempted escape from the swampiness of inertia”, Cominetti describes the work as a way to keep moving, even as these mostly malleable artefacts lie suspended and fossilised as hardened building paste, their gestures to movement coming in the contours of the fabric they’re sculpted from. In a post-show .pdf provided by the artist, a digital reproduction of mass-produced coffee cups accompanies this installation of synthetic symbols “in conversation with body touch and possession clutch”. It’s a delirious ceremony in obeisance to the ordinary as Woozee giddily announces, “BB, I’ll just be right back”.
Exhibition photos, top right.
