All the Things by Harrison is published by London gallery and publisher, Arcadia Missa, and Black’s Dark Pool Party is published by Arcadia Missa and Dominica.
At the event, the two writers will perform excerpts from their books alongside readings by Jackie Wang, Derica Shields and Jasmine Gibson whose work ‘Drapetomania’ (2015) can be downloaded here.
The event promises wine in little plastic cups and a sense of wellbeing.
See the FB event pagefor more details and for a short description of both books.**
Sarah M Harrison, ‘All the Things’ (2016). Courtesy Sarah M Harrison and Arcadia Missa.
Out of a conversation at LISTE Art Fair in Basel, a group of galleries decided to join forces and start Condo: an initiative led by Carlos/Ishikawa’s director Vanessa Carlos, through which 32 international galleries come together on London ground. The aforementioned art space along with Supplement, The Sunday Painter, Arcadia Missa, Chewday’s, Rodeo, Southard Reid and Project Native Informant –all based in the British capital –host works represented by 24 other galleries from around the world throughout a month, mimicking an annual project by dutch dealer Jeanine Hofland called A Petite Fair.
Rather than replacing something, Condo is a proposal in order to support the (art) community, promoting younger galleries through the networked London art scene. Its participants, which count with the support of some big institutional names, aim to highlight the fact that it is necessary to support one another in order to survive and succeed in the contemporary art ecosystem.
Like at any art fair, similarities between artists and works are mere coincidences, and while there is no thematic or aesthetic pattern to follow by the participant galleries, some analogies can be drawn.
In an era where humans are more aware than ever of their interdependence with other non-human entities, the relationship with animals seems to have become a focus of attention. Artists Lea Cetera, Phoebe Collings-James and Jala Wahid, or the trio composed of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian work around these topics, like the projection of humanity onto animals or the metaphors drawn out of their features.
Some of Cetera’s works were left after her solo show at Southard Reid and seamlessly brought together with the works of artists Bruno Zhu and Tessa Lynch for Condo.The artist’s practice turns around the anthropomorphisation of pets and the circulation of domestic animal imagery through the internet. In her installation ‘Mirrored Gourd Triptych’(2015), a glazed porcelain pumpkin-like vegetable ‘watches’ a three screen TV, while sitting on a fake fur carpet. The edible is a gourd: a sort of calabash often used in asian cuisine that Cetera recurrently includes in her work. The TVs show a series of Youtube videos about people’s pets getting miscellaneous care treatments, as if they were people.
Inher installation ‘Just Enough Violence’ (2016)at Arcadia Missa, Collings-James develops an almost mythological imagery out of water-colors depicting cats and horses. They coalesce with A.L. Steiner’s Greatest Hits exhibition: a collection juxtaposed photographs and videos of pop culture figures, such as Madonna or Boychild. Here, animal and human bodies merge and colonise the gallery walls and windows.
AtThe Sunday Painter, Jala Wahid’s ‘Soft Weaponry III’(2016) looks like two plaster bird talons coming out of the wall, near ‘Coco’: a sculpture shaped like two livers on top of a rosewater glycerin pedestal. The artist’s works are surrounded by an arte povera-looking landscape consisting of pieces by Rob Chavasse, Ana Mazzei and Debora Bolsoni.
At Rodeo, Iranian born artists Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh, along withRahmanian, present But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014-15), a series watercolours and collages, where identity is erased and eventually transformed into rabbits and other animals. It’s these crafty and DIY practices that seem to have taken over more sovereign formats and immaculate presentations. Small-scale works on fragile paper nailed on walls, or pieces of ceramics spread out over the place repeatedly emerge, whether it’s in Laura Aldridge’s coloured brick wall at The Sunday Painter, Cetera’s take away coffee pot tops at Southard Reid or in Ulrike Müller’s square painted tiles hung on the Rodeo wall. Multiple layers of watery pigment and more experimental materials such as dye, enamel or DIY jewellery take over the surface ofTom Humphreys’‘untitled’ (2015), Jeanette Mundt‘s painting series ‘Me as Patricia Arquette As the Femme Fatale’ (2015), Josh Kolbo‘s constructed photographs and Nicholas Cheveldave’smultilayered works, covered by friendship bracelet webs.
Meanwhile, Carlos/Ishikawa literally cut the space in three parts, in order to host its representative galleries: Essex Street, Matthew and Freymond Gruth. They reserve the hall for a sort of pop-up store where they sell “artists clothes”. Among other great commissions, including Puppies Puppies, Darja Bajagic and Stewart Middleton –Ed Fornieles’ virtual alter ego of a humanised cartoon fox wrapped by contemporary anxiety is brought to the physical world in the form of a disguise.
According to an interview with Vanessa Carlos, the art world is “a microcosm of the world at large”. That’s why she hopes the Condo initiative will be taken as a model by other cities and countries in promoting collaborative work that is beneficial to the art community and the people working within it. **
Relatively little information is given about how each of the mini solo shows will join together in their groupings but in anticipation of Condo here are our recommendations:
Emily Jones launches the third part of her trilogy with We Are The People We Have Been Waiting For, running at London’s Arcadia Missa from November 13 to December 12.
Following Orange House Action Clinic at Portland’s S1 earlier this year and First Water to Tripoli at London’s Jupiter Woods last year, We Are The People We Have Been Waiting For is the final piece of the artist’s ongoing research, focused on “taking everyday subliminal surfaces and utterances out of their typical scenes”.
On the November 13 opening, Jones will be reading a text entitled GLORY.
When I walk into Not You, Hannah Black’s recent show at London’s Arcadia Missa, which ran October 2 to 31, my thoughts go to a piece of work the artist made in 2013 called ‘Intensive Care’ which was a pane of latex cut into like a kind of paper snowflake to reveal a beautiful hole-y, hurt and intended pattern upon unfolding. I’m not sure why but I read more about the work in a Rhizome Profile on Black, written by Jesse Darling. Mainly I think about the material of latex: what it looks like (skin) and what it is to cut into it and to hang it up and present it as something beautiful – or beautified. A lot of Not You (and its work) seems petrified or inwardly folded and, despite being full of alluring analogies like latex folds and something being folded in on itself, it is difficult not only to read but actually also bear/bare. I mean it is more difficult than words around it can really convey but still, you listen, you feel and you totally understand the undulating swirling mode in which language, language about ‘bodies’ and language about black bodies starts to fold in on itself. I keep getting told by art people to read the Art Forum summary piece written by Paige K. Bradley, as told by Black, about Not Youbecause it clears things up but I don’t want to. I enjoy the text Black has written for the show instead, which sort of says it all.
There are four brown boards called ‘Black Quadrilateral [I-IV]’ (2015), installed upright and evenly across the Arcadia Missa Space painted in the same colour as Black’s skin -pigment matched at hardware store, B&Q, I am told by one of the gallery assistants. Now it seems difficult to talk about them without describing them as faces or standing bodies or figures, but they don’t feel right in this zone of personhood somehow. The surface layer on top of these boards is really, really thick: all the better, it feels, for Black to cut through and etch into. On both sides of all boards thinly scratched wide, empty eyes and upside downs frowns (smiles) are left bare in relation to the brown thick paint that pans the rest. You know how a child might draw a mouth? These ones are always smiling. There is something really sorrowful about this and Black’s grins capture it incredibly specifically and tenderly. The mouths and their crooked curves stay with you. These are, it seems, less ‘bodies’ and more mouths.
Back in the room, Hannah Black’s distinctive voice is sounding loudly from the far corner. There is a new video called ‘All Over’ (2015) there, hiding behind the farthest ‘Black Quadrilateral’. “Don’t worry, I know what love is. Don’t worry, I’m not angry” comes out in a calm and also curt tone that has a sudden as well as a long-term effect -like the mouths. There is something piercing about beginning a qualifying sentence with “don’t worry”. It feels like a kind of acknowledgement that is akin to a deep and maintained eye contact that is as protective and denying as it is defensive. Black’s use of ‘I’ in the work as well as Not You’s text conjures huge specific oceans of truths -or what’s maybe best described as living-in-space -behind things:
“– and again at passport control, where I queued for a long time and tried to keep my face neutral for the border cop’s gaze”.
Behind things in this show could actually be behind words. A lot of the pieces, like the latex folds of ‘Zaum’ (2015) on its shelf, and the airplane blankets poised/posed as chairs up against the walls held behind by glass panes, feel as though in their conception and also their interpretation descriptive words came first and the object is stuck. This is strong and it runs through the whole show like jet lag. Behind words could also be beneath words, and Black has paired (spoken) words with backgrounds in ‘All Over’.
A white image that has waves of white sand washing over its surface is underneath the spoken words: “This is the part we know… This is the part where something happens”. A cough that sounds like it was recorded inside a person’s throat brings the image into a darkness – a black image now, but still paired with waves rolling over the top. The undulations are more similar to smoke this time and it becomes really possible that there is a mist flowing on top of the TV’s screen, in front of your eyes. The lowered voice repeats: “This is the part where nothing happens”.
There is a lot less said in this part. Fewer words. Despite the shared affinity between the (seeming) material qualities of the white and black images that are moving inside the ‘All Over’ video work, this dark part is the ‘part where nothing happens’, as Black says. All at once, all generic applications of ‘movement’, of shared languages, of ‘bodies’ and its usership as a word -and by whom, of readings and of interpretations are turned inside out, frozen, petrified. It’s like Black has exhaled this into the slightest and specific material moment of flowing smoke-y waves to say: this language is shared but not shared.
What is the relationship between words and backgrounds beneath? The question isn’t necessarily being asked in terms of content, here, but more perhaps in terms of presentation and expression.
There are illustrations in the latter part of the video, which move to a scene of a flat map with a diagram of a man moving around (or being moved as though he has a pin underneath him, if he were made of paper). It is not easy to experience this because it is so literal. And yet the red rivers on the map feel painful on a level that carves out even further both the uncomfortability Black describes in the show’s text about finding analogy everywhere, and maybe also the desire to try and resist it. Speaking via another thing’s meaning is like speaking via another person’s being. How can you escape and just flow? **
“How long will it take for you to recognise my brilliance?” asks Jaakko Pallasvuo, on a list numbered fifteen, under a title reading “Works”, in a book called Scorched Earth. Most of these ‘works’ are speculative, conceptual art in the form of performative text that reads in sentences like, “I listen to her talk about her work. I nod. That’s nice, I say”. Some of the immaterial pieces exist merely as a blank space on paper, next to a number that’s the sum of a section, that makes up a novel, published in a limited run of a hundred by Arcadia Missa in August.
The book of sorts –an object –consists of a collection of contemplations, fragments, online posts, chat boxes, that are cobbled together from the Finnish artist’s dawsonscreek.infoTumblr account with a quote on the cover by the blog’s namesake, Dawson Leery (“We can analyze this to death later”). Off-topic and out of context, it’s a pull quote made by a fictional character from a turn-of-the-millennium US teen drama, about an artist he doesn’t know. Because how could he? Dawson Leery doesn’t exist. But he also does. He’s an influence on Scorched Earth,along with other pop cultural constructions, Rihanna, Kanye West, Chloë Sevigny, Eddie Vedder. They all compose a highly allusive maybe-autobiographical text that’s based in the circulated image.
Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.
“The text is not the work”, insists one of Scorched Earth’s fifteen “Works”. Neither is the artwork the life that’s led; one made up of fragments filtered through a body that is odd looking, neurotic, fat, fictionalised (“either a man or a woman or then not”). Here, the online and the offline are indistinguishable, the internet is the IRL, the image, the reality. Nominating himself a kind of Saviour come to reclaim poor Post-Internet (“I want what no one else wants”) Pallasvuo disavows any idea of authenticity: “isn’t it more authentic to be inauthentic than authentic if you’re inauthentic at heart?”
Purporting to a rejection of authenticity while finding it by the very act of that rejection is as far as the irony goes, though. There’s no distance in Scorched Earth. It recognises the absurdity of its own position as a book about the art world by a persona who doesn’t feel a part of it, but also actually is. Pallasvuo might not make it into Wolfgang Tilman’s Frieze celebrity after-party, but still the open and anonymous Quaker meeting he’s been to isn’t as desirable. “The usual case is that the Wolfgangs of the world don’t want us to come in but don’t want us to leave either”. It also works the other way. As much as the artist doesn’t want to be a part of the art institution, he also kind of does.
Image courtesy Jaakko Pallasvuo.
“’Scorched earth’ is a military tactic of utter devastation and a video game, and now it’s a book”, John Beeson opens in an adulatory Afterword at the back of the book. The book in turn is a deeply personal account of the art of war in the war of art –a game that can transform a crippling self-reflexivity into a creative strength. “You take everything you’ve got, your failures and insecurities. You repurpose, repackage, relaunch and repeat until they are categorized as successes.” In the case of Scorched Earth, you write bitter fan fiction about an online troll, fantasise about the “marble and vapour” of a New York City art scene, and lambast an opinion piece on the artistic significance of a Berlin-based “friend group”.
“Competitive social spheres appeal to me”, Jaakko Pallasvuo writes, quoting an imagined art figure called ‘Brad’ who’s blowing a guy called ‘Boris’ while attesting to choosing his field for its cut-throat competition under the guise of thwarted idealism. It could be Simon Denny, Timur Si Qin, Daniel Keller, Tobias Madison, or any number of artists and people Pallasvuo names (he does so selectively) in Scorched Earth. It could even be the artist himself. (“Brad swallows”). **
And the art fair is also introducing a new addition with START Projects, which will take over an entire floor of the Saatchi Gallery with curator-led presentations and group exhibitions, including a fully immersive digital art presentation by Japanese ultra-technologists teamLab, the debut UK solo show of Prudential Eye Award winners Chim↑Pom, and a curated section of solo presentations called ‘This Is Tomorrow’.
Arcadia Missa‘s How to Sleep Faster exhibition and book series launches its sixth edition, running at their London location from August 27 to August 29.
The ongoing publication and exhibition series published its first edition in 2011 and has featured some aqnb favourites throughout its five previous editions, including Jesse Darling, Paul Kneale, Huw Lemmeyand Ann Hirsch inissue #4.
For its sixth edition, How to Sleep Faster asks: “How can we fuck in a way that doesn’t support a patriarchal prism and standard for sex to reflect capitalist relations? Can sex be a site for identity politics, after we are imbued with the lore and failure of the sexual ‘revolution’?” Amongst the dozens of participating artists are Amalia Ulman, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Hannah Quinlan Anderson & Rosie Hastings, and Cristine Brache.
Experimental writing, it is said by those more comfortably ensconced in the sagging sofa of English literature, is simply a genre: a stereotypical form of book in which certain conventions apply, the same as in any other. As such, it’s over. That fuss and nonsense was all fine in the days of the proper modernists, from James Joyce, up to say, Brigid Brophy or Gilbert Sorrentino, but really, that’s all been mapped out. It’s done with. Now it’s time to knuckle down and write studied novels with the occasional nod to Derrida if you really must. The relation to tradition is all the better to show that you have mastered it and are beyond it, there’s no need to be disruptive. Writers want that familiar warm novel feeling back, but with a few winks. Or rather, not back so much as to insist on being in a position to perpetuate it, though cleverly, at the same time as insisting, in tune with the times, that there is no alternative.
Danklands would suggest otherwise. Written by Melbourne-based artist Holly Childs it is a book that takes place in the bits of cities that slipped through the master-plan despite being in the middle of it; something that echoes its place in literature. Danklands is written in English, but at all those points where it turns into a thick wet post-natural swamp, in jargon, awkward love, smoggy spaced-outness around the edges of the city’s docklands. Indelicate sentences, packed with clichés and gulped down verbiage that come back wrong, strands of linguistic mouth-backwash float into the reader’s bottle of Fiji water like the delicate tendrils of a jellyfish before dissolving back into narrative, a cluster of lists, bejewelled molten plastic slag and the goings on of several ciphers that pass for characters. In this movement the book occasionally takes time to gather its own co-ordinates, shifting paces, there’s a precision zoned-outness in the finely, almost molecularly, constructed sentences that flow out into the vast intertidal marshes of language with which the internet is silted together with. At other moments, the text floats in dense poetic dazes, tightly worded and loose.
Danklands has the best YouTube make-up tutorial yet to be lightly spritzed on the surface of video. If you follow its steps precisely, it will make your synapses shimmer as much as it extends your lashes. Working out the co-ordinates of the book, in the coagulated oozing mass, of leachate, is part of the fun. Making a list of all the things that aren’t things in the world is amazing enough, making the links between them work as they are brought into conjunction by fire, sunburn, romantic interest, sleepiness, new kinds of plastic and code. Soon enough you’re gliding over the surface of the ice rink, smoothing out the crud from the surface on a giant Zamboni machine that leaves everything crystalised and clear, a glittering swathe of reflection that you can carve a path into, but not before hot water is already poured over it by the machine, Childs’ writing machine, that recomposes the relations between molecules.**
Contemporary art gallery Queer Thoughts brings a new group exhibition titled Small Pillow to London’s Arcadia Missa, where it will run from April 9 to 15.
The press release comes in the form of a story by artist Maliea Croy that tells of a woman that “was a child in that way—guilty for things she didn’t cause”, a woman who would “grab at things and unintentionally crush them”.
The exhibition is envisioned as a re-materialisation of the idea of a gay bar as a politically queer space, an idea that stemmed from and with their joint 2014 project @Gaybar. Much like their project, the show envisages “a fantasy gay bar through reimagining queer iconography, history and writing that spans geological, political and temporal locations”.
“I like an exhibition that reads as a first person shooter”, says the press release for Quake II, curated by Holly Childs, running at London’s Arcadia Missa and featuring the work of two Australian-based artists Marian Tubbs and André Piguet. Taking its name from the 1997 video game, which in turn takes its title from the 1996 original, Quake, the show was conceived as a “non-linear curve” against Childs’ upcoming book Danklands, published by the aforementioned London gallery and launching across Europe and Australia through mid-December.
The exhibition very much reads as an interactive video game. Boarded off from the outside by white exhibition walling, there’s a window smashed through the panelling and supporting pinewood frames with a view inside that’s blocked by the back of Tubbs’ ‘untitled (the sea)’ (2014) video. It’s part of the artist’s ‘New Hunger‘ installation, featuring among other things a person-sized makeshift doorway where on walking through manouverability is key.
Quake II @ Arcadia Missa. Installation view. Courtesy Marian Tubbs.
That’s especially true at an exhibition opening where the gallery floor is not only littered with Piguet’s lego trees, a mug, a red and white-dotted ceramic mushroom and a glazed and raw clay candle holder, but is also crowded with human bodies. At the centre of this single work installation scattered around the room, ‘WET_TIP_HEN_ax (blk lgn pale edit) Feat. SLCT troll garden garb’ (2014) lists “pigment”, “small amounts of gallium” and the presumably made up word of “tetrahydrosmaugs” as its materials, while a cloudy, semi-transparent battle-axe made from resin hangs in its centre. It’s fluoro axe-head equivalent is lying on the floor in a corner.
Tubbs’ dazzling stews of synthetic colour drift across loosely hung fabric limping from and falling out of wall-hung frames, a ribbon of motionless-but-abstractly-moving material tumbles down from ceiling to floor. “Feminist repurpose video #gamergate subversion shit” says the press release, as one considers the video raining Emojii and immaterial images of torn out fragments of words in ‘untitled (the sea)’. It’s at eye level and blocking the hole in the gallery wall, while announcing, “It’s hard for girls”. On the floor in the corner, ‘Vulgar Latin‘ (2014) projects screenshots of a YouTube window with a view into industrial sludge that’s suspended in time, floating across space. The soundtrack travels from pensive piano to crackling and crunching synth lines that slice across 2D gradient rectangles giving the illusion of 3D cylinders. Sometimes they bounce back from, other times bouncing out of, its frame. Bit coins. Coinye. Spilt milk. A wavy strip of snakeskin.
In announcing an interest in content that “reroutes its form” at the final Lunch Bytes in London before reading Augustine’s “make-up tutorial that is also subliminally a climate change awareness campaign, or a self-defence for women pep talk”, excerpted from Danklands, Childs expanded on an interest in physical space mediated by the online, in a Google Maps still of the Melbourne Docklands where it’s secret Control Pond Q is hidden from virtual view. In Quake II, Childs, Tubbs and Piguet present the spill over from the realm of the video game to the gallery floor in the implicit culture war of an exhibition that for once makes the Invisible Wall visible. **
