The GTC has been gathering “objects/artworks often saved from becoming part of the nations waste” and posting pictures of their finds on Facebook and Instagram since February, and will now be showing them in an exhibition to bring together stories of “joy, pain, and humour”.
In hopes of one day becoming a museum, GTC says they are drawn to these lost treasures made by unknown artists, both for their ability to “make you smile,” as well as being the creations of “people whoever they may be and for what reasons unknown and not outsider objects, a term that relies on an assumption that certain ideologies and practices have inclusivity/exclusivity.”
Charlie Woolley‘s solo exhibition Psychedelic Vermin is showing at London’s Lima Zulu, opening September 3.
There’s not much in terms of a press release beyond the name and the date to elucidate on what to expect but given the nature of the title and Woolley’s involvement in art metal band Lead Pipe, one can only imagine the aesthetic. Woolley and the band also contributed a track to Mat Jenner’s Foam project and curated the epic K.I.S.S group exhibition at London’s Generation & Display, a North Acton gallery in an industrial area that’s not unlike the one of the Omega Works space of Lima Zulu.
Showing for one night only at Lima Zuluon 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.
Menna Cominnetti, Woozee (2015) @ Lima Zulu. Courtesy the artist.
It’s an act of half-delirious self-expression that the 2014 Bloomberg New Contemporariesartist 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”.
Menna Cominnetti, Woozee (2015) @ Lima Zulu. Courtesy the artist.
With Material Art Fair 2015 set to start in Mexico City this week, galleries and events of interest are bound to be centred around the Mexican capital. They include booths from Parallel Oaxaca, Queer Thoughts and New Galerie, as well as the Under a Thawing Lake exhibition presented by Dark Arts International, and an opening at Lodos Gallery.
In London, Space is showing work from three artist-run spaces including Piper Keys, The Duck and that of Caspar Heinemann, Morag Keil and Kimmo Modig from Life, while Viktor Timofeev is closing his Proxyah exhibition at Jupiter Woods and Dora Budor is appearing for an artist lecture at tank.tv.
Tabor Robak is one of the artists in a group show curated by Samuel Leuenberger called Constructed Culture sounds like Conculture in Dublin, Harm van den Dorpel has another solo show in Berlin, Caroline Ongaro is curating Exquisite Collapse and Finnish performance group Vibes is presenting a site-specific installation at Helsinki’s SIC.
Opening during London’s dizzying Frieze Art Fair, Glamourshotz invites visitors to get a free portrait taken, digitally finished by Kulesh using Photoshop techniques like watermarking and airbrushing, and available for purchase or free digital copies. As the show rolls on, the portraits will collect and hang at the gallery space, the exhibition becoming itself through the process.
Exploring not only our reflections in today’s image-obsessed culture, but our social acceptance of them as such, Kulesh’s show obliquely references the phenomena and movements of modern culture: the cult of the selfie, the filters that remove us from definition, etc.
Megan Rooney and I both grew up on the frayed edges of Toronto’s sprawling suburbia, and it shows in strange, imperceptible ways that I’m somehow always newly surprised by. You can see it in random, erratic things, in our shared nostalgia for Henry Moore’s monolithic women lying permanently along the floors of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), or for teendoms spent in North American malls as a sort of female rite of passage. You can also see it in the way we react to ‘othered’ things, the equal parts affinity and disgust at the candy-coloured California dreams of the coast, for example, or the outsider’s fascination with sleek Parisian woman gliding through distinctly non-North American boutiques.
Rooney did an entire piece about that, lurking in the shimmering hallways of the Galeries Lafayette, a Parisian department store for which she created an audio piece to be used as a sort of audio tour as part of Paul Kneale and Raphael Hefti‘s Pleasure Principles project. The work arose out of her residency at Foundation Galeries Lafayette, an art foundation historically separate from the luxury retail company despite being funded by it. “I was interested in bringing out that connection to explore both the relationship between art and commerce and my own personal fascination with the behaviours and aesthetics present in this Parisian luxury store,” says Rooney in an email “[B]oth sites refer to each other. At the exhibition you’re informed you need to go to the mall to see all the work. At the mall, your shopping experience, so carefully constructed, is punctured by work that does not directly correspond with the shopping or browsing behaviours you’re otherwise programmed to enact in that space. So you’re doubly displaced.”
We conduct the entire interview over email, and Rooney painstakingly edits her answers in the way that anyone wedded to language inevitably does. When I inform her we have to make cuts, she balks: “I have answered the questions in a kind of form itself, I think it’s a shame to shred it apart simply to make it shorter.” I get it; I once fought an editor tooth and nail for an entire day over a semicolon. (The semicolon stayed, but I never wrote for that publication again.) To Rooney, I’m sympathetic but unbudging. Still, when I cut one whole answer to make the word count, I feel remorseful; it, too, was good.
‘Pleasure & Charity’ at Toronto’s AGO. Installation view courtesy of artist.
What was it about your sound piece Pleasure & Charity that belonged at the AGO?
Megan Rooney: I don’t really like the idea of ‘site-specific’, because I think it implies a static place, and I believe that context is always changing, even in a big museum. That was an important starting point for that work. I had visited the AGO many times growing up in Toronto and that room full of Moore’s sculptures has always seemed very heroic, masculine, and esoteric to me. So I think I had a desire to invert all of those things. Make it quotidian, gaudy pink and concrete. I thought if I could turn this austere modernist city tomb into a suburban strip-club-cum yoga studio it would be an adequate background for the audio I wanted to create. It was an amazing feeling of power to be able to subvert the environment that the authority of the museum designates as appropriate for its masterpieces.
I’m keenly aware of the aesthetics and social codes of place and this lurid suburban taste seemed to me like an unwelcome reality that the museum didn’t want to let in. That I didn’t want to let in either really. There was some kind of self-harm involved in reproducing this taste. Which is also a kind of evasiveness that’s sometimes necessary when you’re facing such a monolithic context. The sound work was developed specially for that setting, with the rented white leatherette furniture and bright pink lighting and yoga girls in mind. I think its one of my most acerbic texts. There are bits that are definitely processing some darker feelings about this suburban culture I’m evoking.
What was some of the thought process behind your Affluent Insights show at Lima Zulu?
MR: I started making the work for Lima Zulu directly after spending a lot of time hanging out at a shopping mall in Paris. It brought me back to my days as a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, where the mall was the most important social space, a kind of corporate public square, where all your friendships, loves and boredom were played out. There’s some kind of rift between how you would characterise the things people are doing there, which are all very consumer-oriented, and the empathetic knowledge one has of the psychological attachments that one forms to the place with real feelings. Real memories.
When I started making my show at LZ, I was really aware of the atmosphere of the space, it’s own cult following and set of attitudes that make it distinct in the landscape of London project spaces. That atmosphere blended in my mind with the atmosphere of the mall in Paris, and the one it evoked of my teenage mall in Toronto, and it became a hybrid in my imagination.
In general the subject matter of one show bleeds into the next for me, it’s all part of one giant work that I’m inviting people into, like a life. The work creates an experience that’s not a replica of life, but more like something where those half-corporate, half-personal memories have been made aesthetic, plastic. Something changes there. It makes you realise how memory is unreliable, always slyly attaching itself like a parasite onto the things around you. You think that its recorded, but actually you’re just seeing bits of your reflection. By making the work I can intervene into that. Create a parallel reality that doesn’t depend on my mind anymore, can have its own existence.
Affluent Insights at Lima Zulu. Installation view courtesy artist.
I love that—memory as nothing but your own reflection. Your work also scales along a lot of different media: drawing, sculpture, text, audio, video. What did you start with? Is there a combination you prefer?
MR: I think of these installations as one single work, with many parts. A type of story telling with objects. There is always a character involved. She’s always been drawn from a mix of personal experiences and the acute observation of woman in public situations (in transit, art parties, openings, at the nail salon, at bars and clubs at the places I have waitressed at). The characters are also drawn from memory, semi-biographical at times. I am always trying to create a specific feeling with each installation. To draw you, the viewer, into some kind of space outside of the universe or outside your computer, your bed, your scene. But inside a social system, or into a dream, a situation, a memory and then maybe you’re back in bed but the room feels different. And for me it’s about weaving things together and creating a space where different positions and experiences can exist at the same time in a network of complex relations. Not to describe the complexity but be able to look at it all and get closer to the real through a certain kind of irresponsibility. But it’s filtered too. The result is never chaos. We’re always managing our intake of the world. It’s an animal thing, but now also a high tech one. We repeat all our biggest problems, make variations based on who’s selling.
Somewhere in the making process the words come but the sculptures always have to exist in some way before that can happen. The words usually flow out quickly, late at night when the feeling is almost violent, like untangling all the various codes and your desires and you’re drinking lots of wine and having lots of sex. And if you push hard enough, maybe you can bring down the whole house, or maybe you don’t live in a house (I don’t). But you are in the studio and all those things exist together. The objects are always made by hand, often constructed out of clay and then cast in various materials. Plaster, resin, cement, faux marble. Messy at times, rough, wonky, imperfect and then other times they appear more finished, sexy and sleek. And I always tend to shy away from conventional display methods like plinths, because they seem to belong so strongly to the world of sales and I think I am always trying to lure my audience into some kind of world where they can forget about such things.
Megan Rooney at Till the Stars Turn Cold group show. Installation view courtesy artist.
You’re also taking part in a group exhibition called Till the Stars Turn Cold at the S1 Artspace in Sheffield. Tell me a bit about what you’re contributing.
MR: For the show at S1 I was commissioned to make a new work. I wanted to further explore the relationship between the audio texts that form the thread of my ongoing narrative, and the sculptural works that produce a parallel dimension. Still circumscribed within their universe, but evoking that universe through materials. Some of the works that are shown are a series of watercolour, ink, and pencil paintings on paper, which are portraits of women I know. Sometimes it’s one person, sometimes a few blended together. Sometimes they’re really identifiable (if you know my friends and family), sometimes more abstract, fading into and out of their likeness. I’ve been making this series for a long time, but only felt like I wanted to show them now. To introduce this drawing and painting process. These works had me thinking a lot about representation, and material hierarchies involved in representation, as some of the marks are made by cheap markers, highlighters even. How they related to the type of likeness that was achieved.
At some point this progressed naturally into a sculptural inquiry. I was making rough figurative armatures, not even sure what they were for, from abandoned couch cushions that Harry [Burke] had left around the library when he stored all his things here for a few months. And I began adding things to these from a certain material language, in a way similar to how I build the texts. Encountering something. Processing and recombining into a new form that still shows where it came from if you glance at the right angle.
From there, the narrative aspect that I had been constructing in the text started to inform how they might fit together or present themselves. I wanted them to be sculpturally autonomous, but also half in another language. Not of craft per se, but this uncanny zone that applies to things like stuffed animals that direct you toward identifying the form with something you know from the world, but aren’t rendered ‘realistically’. This difference, which you are very aware of, becomes a different kind of reality. Where caricature becomes blurred. When Picasso painted Gertrude Stein’s portrait she told him it didn’t look like her, and he said ‘Don’t worry it will’. I always loved that.
Megan Rooney at 0% Promise at SPACE. Installation image courtesy artist.
Any themes that you think umbrella your work, or connections between the shows and the mediums that you are always trying to make or unmake?
MR: Yes, of course. There are many themes, although I don’t isolate them from each other in my process. The construction of character, of subject, particularly a feminine subject with which I identify. The beauty and corruption of language. The slippage between its written and spoken variations. The seduction of the voice. The unreliability of narrative. The necessity of narrative. The uncanny lurking in the everyday. The psychological abjectness of contemporary culture. The desire for meaning. The hyperbole of pop-culture notions of self. **
A cursory examination of Emily Jones’ practice suggests an engagement with current accelerationist rhetoric: that aestheticised taxonomy of collapse where nature systems fall and decline, technology mutates organically, dolphins swim kawaai through toxic sludge and tribal peoples wander around wearing Nike in the endless flattened desert of the real. But Jones is a different kind of taxonomist. The point seems not to illustrate the sameness or equivalence of things, but to invent systems – algorithms, even, though the terms of the equation are obscured – by which she (and we) might understand the world.
Emily Jones, The Hudson River (2014) @ Lima Zulu exhibition photo. Courtesy the artist.
The Hudson River, Jones’ recent solo show at Lima Zulu project space, is an installation composed of organic matter, paper, fabric, tape and text. The latter appears in object form – individual words printed large on white A4s laid out in several symmetrical lines on the floor in parallel to the wall – but also as a kind of ghost data that remains in the air. This ghost data comprises traces of a reading given by Jones at the opening (John Locke’s 1689 text ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’) and an exhibition text distributed on paper and on the facebook event page:
“A database of medicinal plants of Bangladesh – A history of prophecy in Israel – The foraging success of the Scarlet Ibis – Treatise on the propagation of orchid seeds in vitro – Pigeon Homing as a Paradigm – The Lake as a Microcosm.
I instinctively put the rose quartz in my mouth and she tells me I shouldn’t do that.
(It still stands)
#chthonic #oneiric #apotheosis.”
Here, the vernacular and the experiential collide with the global and colossal, as with Jones’ earlier digital collages ‘Is that a castle over there? No, it’s a nuclear power station’ (2010) and ‘The Endolithic Biome’ (2010). There’s nothing in the space but a big yellow melon and a folded fabric printed with a blue earth swimming in space, while the words around the walls are like some kind of early computing system, machinic in form and alchemical in affect. These are dictats, incantations, commands in a command-line: exchange cultivate expand multiply magnify. They’re grouped according to their phonetics, arranged for pleasure of the tongue: invoke evoke. I don’t see it at first, but there’s a row of white soap cakes lined up by the door as though packed for sale fresh from the factory. There’s something about their ‘silence’ – and I’m talking about a silence particular to things as they might exist unanimated by the ostentatious theatrics of art or commerce, a thing-being untroubled by irony – that seems to communicate something of their journey, their production before being soaps on a shelf or on the floor in a gallery. This too is offered quietly, without judgment.
Emily Jones, The Hudson River (2014) @ Lima Zulu exhibition photo. Courtesy the artist.
The sole wall-based element is a sheet of paper that reads #IWILL. It’s held in place by a single strip of neon tape and it holds the whole thing together, both formally and metaphorically. The lightness or slightness of the work might be, on some level, part of the message: that the system of things by which we live is delicate, intricate, organic and precarious. The Hudson River (in addition to living one of its lives as a waterway in greater New York) exists simultaneously as a temporary art installation in North London and as a space online that is part archive and part narrative: a girl and a glacier sit in among the documentation on Jones’ website, along with text not present in the space. to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life, it reads. In the end, every algorithm is linguistic and no algorithm will save us; there can only ever be an intention – which is the function of language – and this alone makes magical sense of that which we can neither control nor fully understand. #IWILL is an expression of the will to live in among other living things. And the will to live – common to the human world, the animal kingdom and the accelerationist fantasy of technological singularity – is the most mysterious organic notion of all. **
Lima Zulu brings the latest solo exhibition by artist Jeremy Glogan titled Passive Acceptance of Increasing Oppression to its London space from July 10 to July 14.
In lieu of a press release, the gallery and artist have only released two paragraph-long quotes, one captioned ‘From an interview with a corporate worker’ and the other ‘From an interview with a painter’, hinting at the parallels between material and cultural production, and the “forced logic of the system” as analogised via the process of painting:
The foreground and the background are different but they look quite nice together don’t they?
Jesse Darling‘s solo exhibition NOT LONG NOW is opening at London’s Lima Zulu on January 23.
Ever the artist to disrupt the drive to a dialectic, the accompanying blurb for the exhibition is drawn from a dummy text Lorem Ipsumgeneratorand translated from Latin “in collaboration with” Google Translate to yield some eerily relevant references to “embedded poverty”, “the torturer’s television station” and “the United States Bureau of the great”. Considering that Darling’s work concerns itself with all sorts of rupture, not least symbolised by the destruction of the World Trade Centre and imperialism as we know it, the text stands as an apt analogy drawing from the dead Roman Empire to the current US one, with Google as its cypher.
Partners, a group exhibition of work by Darja Bajagić, Patrick Groth, Michael Handley, James Miller and Hans Jacob Schmidt at London’s Lima Zulu, is about a lot of things. It’s the name of a pub in New Haven, Connecticut, for one, immediately contextualising the content of the show and demanding meditation on its curation by Joseph Buckley. Conversation with the IJV co-founder, ex-director and now Yale School of Art colleague to the artists featured was challenging and to some degree, so was the exhibition. An air of familiarity required a prior knowledge of what was going on, and deciphering artistic practices within these relationships took time.
The friendship between the Partners artists (they came to know each other at a bar in New Haven, Connecticut of the same name) was certainly part of the curatorial process, and although its title stood as a constructed red herring, it was actually very apt. Rather than distracting the participant from the relevant themes within the show, it provided a familiar suggestion of the context, not only in which the show and works were created, but also in which we all exist. This might sound quite abstract –and in many ways, the main ideas behind the show were. The paradox of logistically putting together an exhibition in which the themes investigated stand without structure is a challenge that many curators are faced with, and Buckley certainly seemed to explore this.
Hans Jacob Schmidt, ‘Structural Ornament’ (2013). Michael Handley, ‘Daniel Predicted It?’ (2013). Exhibition view.
It was partly about the process of putting together a show, and this issue of practicality grew from existing as a very modest concept into standing as a very important one. The organisation involved a lot of communication, and in this way the exhibition stands as a medium for conversation. As in any curated exhibition, the pieces themselves also communicated with each other. Upon entry, Hans Jacob Schmidt’s ‘Structural Ornament’ conspicuously dressed the show space floor with vinyl lettering, while the pressed and folded coins of Michael Handley’s ‘Daniel Predicted It?’ also took up the physical floor space that would usually be taken by a gallery visitor. On the wall of the single-room gallery, a small sculpture by Darja Bajagic, ‘ForScan Plasters (Fraud)’, facing two other paintings: ‘Book Cover #2’ by Patrick Groth, and ‘Untitled’, by James Miller. The space was smaller than expected, but provided an ideal platform for visitor and works to interact, and for such spatial conversation to develop. This process of moving through the latter as a way of getting to the former was especially striking, and certainly helps create the form of the exhibition.
Engaging in a shared conversation –a general conversation about any of the separate concepts operating in each work -puts artist and curator in the same creative framework, and the anonymity of both roles within this infrastructure was mentioned by Buckley as a point of interest. The ambiguity, and the disclosure of certain things, allowed for specifics to be recognised –and for a particular time and place to be highlighted within the relationships held by those involved. It’s no coincidence that you become friends with those you work with. The curator noted that he was mostly surprised by how much of himself he found in the art pieces; by what chimed within him throughout the curation of the show. Such elements of the work exist anyway and without being arranged, and for Buckley, much of his practice centred around allowing for these personal affiliations. By choosing not to control the work, he binds them together, highlighting the shared attitude that the pieces illustrate.
It is evident that Partners is more than a group exhibition in that it is a social position held by those involved. Although it might best enjoyed by those occupying said position, it maintained a bold and curious manner that has clearly been thoroughly worked through. It illustrates the pragmatics of Partners as a context, explicitly investigating curator-artist collaboration and process.
In the accompanying punctuation-free blurb, references to (ex-)Neocon Francis Fukuyama, cleaning products and telecommunications point to the pervasiveness of a suffocating modernity and ends with a reference to the Dutch still-life of Vanitas, which presumes mortal life as generally meaningless. That sense of futility is certainly something that trails Shiomitsu’s work and an ideal end the oppressive year that was.
“images of rapture creep into me slowly, even in the most beautiful images I painted the room with white supermatte emulsion thickened with bleach white printer pigment ink (quick note on Francis Fukuyama in japanese fuku means to wipe or to mop & yama means mountain) caulk pen ink odourless deodorant chalk and limewater bleaching cream pigmentation corrector changing all interior fittings to anti-ligature alternatives the semiconductors driving communication technology are manufactured in a cleanroom i washed the brushes and rollers in bottled sparkling water and used a branded low-odour solvent to clean oil-based dirt roller sleeves for the application of matte paints were used exclusively contaminatory particles are minimised in these environments and actively filtered out through controlled airflow I mopped the parquet floor with a subtly scented alkali solution the lean production system is designed to minimise waste and deliver maximum value to the end consumer We are always unaware of being sure of something we really don’t know all glassware was installed by professionals wearing the correct safety apparatus taking the correct precautions sometimes I think I eat too much we approach the landscape like a vanitas handle ornaments like a mirror”
Playwright Michael Harding presents a performance taken from research conducted over the last two years for a play, Removal Men, at Lima Zulu, December 4.
Based around a group of security guards at an immigrant detention and removal centre, the story follows their progress as they engage in a series of workshops aimed at improving the lives of detainees and drawing from a half-century of group exercises including Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Family Constellations, and clown workshops. “The trouble is, the world around them appears to be preparing for another international conflict, a third world war, and their job description is becoming increasingly militarised”.
Described by Warwick as an artist known for their “acerbic commentaries on participation and the public event”, one can only imagine what the gif from the iconic Edvard Munch scene-made stop-motion-short in Sebastian Corsor’s The Scream represents, beyond being an obtuse press release.
Plus this:
“House Residents + guests > low key come over ” – Mike Levitt, 2013
