Texts

What to make of a figure that casts no shadow? In painting class recently, I overheard a conversation between the tutor and a fellow student. The question was how to give objects weight, to convey a convincing sense of the thing in its place - material, situated - rather than floating weightless in space. The answer: shadows. 

(Dis)embodied Burdens aims to examine the intricacies of mental, emotional and physical repercussions of social gendered identity. The works in the exhibition will be in conversation to create a collective resistance to the traditional, non-queer, (post)colonial objectification and degradation of women. Some artists will remove their bodies as the focal point, whereas others choose instead to tell their story through an authentic self-portrayal. 

“As a remedy to life in society, I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach."

Albert Camus

Glitch: The City as palimpsest curated by Huma Kabakci at Cooke Latham Gallery explores the urban landscape and the city as a palimpsest- with the many historical layers, erasures and reconstructions it may hold. The exhibition brings together work by Radhika Khimji, Hamish Pearch, Shahpour Pouyan, Jaro Varga and Adia Wahid. Similar to a palimpsest, the layers of urban form keep a city’s history alive by constantly effacing, rebuilding, and ameliorating. The artists in the exhibition explore theories and ideas around landscape, psychogeography and utopia.

The Epilogue is placed some sixty or so yards from Maureen and roughly about fifty or so from a Wagon dripping, sitting in a camper-site. Going by its bilious pong we should possibly assume it’s playing to conceal a handful of pirouetting abstractions dealing solely with ideals rather than actual events, there are no eyes here.

Imagine you are looking at a house in the sun. The front is illuminated, and you appreciate the crispness of the red brick against the sky. Now turn to the shaded side of the house. The bricks are the same orange-red, but look closely. Can you see that they look colder, bluer even?

I rub sanitizer into my hands. Lock down is lifting and I am making my way to Johnny Izatt-Lowry's studio in Wandsworth. It is the first time on a bus in four months and as we speed down Tottenham Court Road, I am struck by how quiet central London is. It is the morning rush hour and there is a stillness I have only ever seen at night. But there are no revellers here now, just a scattering of strangers in face masks. A ghost town I think before going back to reading my book. We adapt quickly to ghosts and new normals and pandemics now. We have to in order to survive.

A rich landlord was also a miser. As he was stingy and difficult, no tenant would work his lands. Soon his lands were untilled and his tanks and canals dried up. So he became poorer and poorer. Yet he never learned to be generous and was unwilling to pay his workmen.

My car is a shit tip. It is an albatross of congealed shame that hangs around my neck. A surprise passenger always fills me with heavy dread. I pretend it’s not usually like this. But it’s always like this.

In Spain, major social get-togethers (such as weddings or holiday family meals, for example) can start shortly after noon and carry on way after dusk. In this long intermezzo, the table is refilled with an incessant succession of hors d'oeuvres, seafood, roasted lamb, pork, salads, abundant wine, seasonal sweets, liquor, and cigars. To ease digestion, the meal is often spiced up with juicy gossip and the laundering of family secrets, unsolicited medical updates, bad jokes, ill-intentioned puns and eventually blatant insults that in the worst cases leads to drama (domestic violence indeed spikes during the holiday season).

Comedias a honor y gloria (Plays to the honour and glory) is a project conceived specifically by the artist Greta Alfaro for La Gallera. In it, a carefully designed architectural structure lined with shelves full of wine glasses with red wine, a pistol and surveillance cameras compose a stage setting for an audience that, once transformed into actors, take part in its violent destruction. The project comprises two moments, the action and its result, the offering and the remains after the catharsis.

I remember those first days of fear and panic on the streets of Hackney.

Queues wrapped themselves around Lidl and loo roll jokes swamped the Internet.

In the run up to lockdown I had started an affair with a young “River-Man” from Limehouse, named on account of his balconied apartment overlooking the Thames.

For most of the 20th century’s first half, the cluster of red bricks that is now Chapter Arts Centre housed a secondary school, Canton High, nicknamed the Canton Cowsheds for its previous life as a slaughterhouse. The site has been many things, its history as busy as the building was until recent events took over. The Chilean painter Francisco Rodriguez - stimulated by the space’s unlikely pre-history in his first time exhibiting in Wales - has used his exhibition to resurrect some of the venues past lives. In doing so, his works bring the location’s capacity for shapeshifting – a prominent theme in all Rodriguez’s work – to light.

While making this show I’m thinking again about symbols of connection and looking at sculptures that are often hidden or overlooked. 

Cobbing’s sculpture and film play directly with and into each other. Moving and static each time, this work is as descriptive as it is symbolic. The work exemplifies the relationship between sight, touch, and sometimes sound.  However awkward and ultimately frustrating, a stumbling attempt at communication is present. 

What to paint? The permanent problem facing every painter who confronts a blank canvas, the question constitutes a spur for certain artists to construct entire universes of shape, color and meaning. Why paint this thing or that object? What form, feeling, image or idea merit recording and how?