Isaac Lythgoe

Lonesome Wife @ Seventeen, Sep 29 – Nov 5

28 September 2016

The Lonesome Wife group exhibition is on at London’s Seventeen, opening September 30 and running to November 5.

Organised by Attilia Fattori Franchini, the exhibition includes Lisa Holzer, Isaac Lythgoe, Victoria Adam, Adriano Amaral, Noah Barker, Luis Miguel BendañaPatrizio di MassimoJustin Fitzpatrick, and Vanessa Safavi.   

The exhibition takes its name from American novelist William H. Gass’ 1989 book Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. The press release includes an excerpt that states “…there’s nothing female about a column of air, a gall on a tree – surely both, like bloomers on the swing’s seat… so I’m a spiky bush at least, I like to think, knotty and low growing, scratchy though flowering, a hawthorne would suit me”, alluding to the themes of the show.

Using text as a starting point, Gass creates “a parallel between a concrete use of language and the female body of Babs Masters, both employed as tools of persuasion, absorbing the reader-viewer in a game of intimate eclipse and revelation”. The exhibition explores seduction and how it can serve as narrative tool as well as “an antidote to boredom and disinterest”. Exhibited works hint at the body, the physicality of text and the linguistic capacity of objects. They move between form, process and content, to be read or to be felt.

See the Seventeen website for details.**

Seventeen

Luis Miguel Bendaña, ‘Blush On A Man’ (2015), Detail. Courtesy the artist.

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Isaac Lythgoe @ Almanac, Jun 25 – Jul 30

28 June 2016

London-based artist Isaac Lythgoe is presenting a solo exhibition, 5225 Figueroa Mountain Rd at London’s Almanac, opening June 25 and running to July 30.

There is little information to accompany the show but we can expect work installed around a space that is varied in its media, and narrative and figurative in its subject. Lythgoe’s titles seem always crucial to his work and recent shows such as Never Land Alone, a duo exhibit with Jack Lavender in Paris and I am Getting Sicker, at Almanac’s Turin space early last year, hosted many intricate titles of work that act like sentences freshly cut out of conversations.

Lythgoe’s most recent body of work for example has included several headboards, some slightly defaced and some brought to life. This will be Almanac’s second London show in its new space, following a solo show by Maria Gorodeckaya last month.

See the Almanac website for (limited) details.**

Jack Lavender + Isaac Lythgoe, Never Land Alone (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy Exo Exo + Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris.
Jack Lavender + Isaac Lythgoe, Never Land Alone (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy Exo Exo + Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris.

 

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Jack Lavender + Isaac Lythgoe, Never Land Alone (2016) documentation

24 June 2016

Never Land Alone, a two person show by Jack Lavender and Isaac Lythgoe ran from January 23 through February 27 in the mezzanine room of Paris’ Eric Hussenot. Organised by project space Exo Exo, the show and the space acted out a journey into what Lythgoe describes as “fantasy living”, realised as something of a scripted shrine.

With various items scattered across the room, occupying floor placements, ceiling spots and spaces that are made into thresholds, the hierarchies of installation seem muddled and it is at once immersive. The items in the duo’s environment include a novelty beer mug from ‘PARIS’, a bed headboard with an image of 90s film character The Mask printed over its leather surface, a burning joss stick, another headboard with Michael Jackson’s eyes peering through, and a Kenzo trainer box tucked behind a curtain.

Jack Lavender + Issac Lythgoe, Never Land Alone (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesty the artists and Galerie Hussenot, Paris
Jack Lavender + Isaac Lythgoe, Never Land Alone (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy Exo Exo and Galerie Hussenot, Paris.

The two headboards create a space between them, further emphasised by the white net curtains that play the role of delicate walls in the middle of the space, revealing themselves yet alluding simultaneously to something more private.

Never Land Alone‘s press release is a text written by Lythgoe describing the mating rituals —and his feelings about them —of the male pseudoscorpion, whose claws shake and the male bowerbird, who carefully decorates his love nest with trinkets and specific items.

In plain sight in the gallery space a metal sculpture by Lavender and a transparent obelisk by Lythgoe sit and, according to the London-based artists who wrote to us about the show, “take up something of a dance, something like the first dance at a wedding”.**

Exhibition photos top right.

Jack Lavender + Isaac Lythgoe’s Never Land Alone exhibition was on at Paris’ Galerie Eric Hussenot, running January 23 to February 27, 2016.

Header image: Jack Lavender + Isaac Lythgoe, Never Land Alone (2016) Exhibition view. Courtesy Exo Exo and Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris.

 

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