London

“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…” Suddenly, images flash through your mind of a baby blue gingham-bedecked Dorothy clicking the heels of her red sequined shoes. The artwork of British artist Jonathan Baldock is equally transportative. Baldock blurs the line between art and theatre with his cast of enigmatic characters – typically meticulously crafted, soft, pastel pink sculptural assemblages that focus on the human form with an unsettling sense of humour. Employing crafts traditionally associated with the domestic sphere, such as home felting, basket weaving, candle making, appliqué, ceramics and stitching, Baldock’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates painting, sculpture, performance and playful installations, finding inspiration in the enchanted realms of mythology, masks, tribal rituals and folkloristic traditions. Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Baldock’s work has a performative element that encourages its audience to engage with it. For There’s No Place Like Home at CGP London (on until 30 July 2017), Baldock’s largest and first solo exhibition in a public institution in London, the artist, referencing the 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz, creates a symphony of surreal sculptures that play with scale, horror and marvel bordering on the grotesque. Baldock’s work can also be seen in Hull (at the Hull Maritime Museum until 2^nd July 2017 as part of its UK City of Culture programme throughout 2017) and in Blackpool (at the Grundy Art Gallery as part of a collaborative touring exhibition in three parts with fellow artist Emma Hart until 12^th July).

On the occasion of Baldock’s solo show spread over the two spaces of CGP London in Southwark Park, including Dilston Grove, the cavernous historic church that was one of the first concrete buildings of its size in Britain, Marcelle Joseph talks to Baldock about his theatrical sculptural practice and the new cast of characters he was commissioned to make for There’s No Place Like Home.

Congratulations on your latest solo exhibition at CGP! Working in such an iconic and monumental building as Dilston Grove and covering two separate locales, how did you approach this show? What came first? The form or scale of the sculptures? The materials? The reference to The Wizard of Oz?

CGP commissioned me to make new works for their Dilston Grove (church) space. As you say, it is such an iconic space and could be viewed as an artwork in its own right! It is long, narrow and very high and so not an easy space to show in. I felt the work had to be made in response to these factors so I always knew that I wanted the work to utilise the height. From here, the idea of hanging works from the beams above evolved. This adds to the already very theatrical nature of the space – not just a church but a stage.

For me, showing in a church made it impossible not to think of mortality. The exhibition came about during a time when I was thinking a lot about the vulnerability and weakness of the human body. Of the shortness of life... I felt the need to oppose this and to make monuments to celebrate its strength and wonder. I started thinking about the church as a body and the sculptures within as fragmented body parts  - kind of votives made monstrous. The Wizard of Oz connection quickly succeeded these ideas, and  – firstly the idea of the homemade within the works, the significance of home to people today, but also that Oz is the home of all the unusual characters. Ozma is more interested in the unusual ones than the ordinary ones.

Your work is fascinated with the human body and its many orifices. For this show, the viewer encounters a human-scale votive candle adorned with waxen ears, a wicker chain that morphs into a human spine, chandeliers shaped like breasts hung from the ceiling and a sandy table in the form of an eye. Is your use of the body and its many parts a way of demanding that your sculptures perform for their audience?  

Absolutely – I see these sculptures as very performative. Not just in their references to the body and their energy but also in the fact that they are often activated in performance by live performers. These interactions often leave the performer heavily costumed and seem less alive than the sculptures, and I love that!

Carrying on with the corporeal theme, do the bodily orifices depicted in your work have a sinister, sexual or violent side to them as well?

I enjoy the fact that orifices (particularly the word) often have sexual connotations, which in turn could be sexual or violent. For me, however, the orifice becomes a metaphorical portal to pass from one space to another. The doorway from the outer world to the internal world, the physical to spiritual. Orifices on the body are mouths, ears, noses and eyes and not just the anus, urinary meatus, vagina and nipples – which I guess carry more sexual connotations. I think these two aspects can easily run parallel as they do in life. It is the dark and light aspect of the world we live in… or does that make it sound too much like some life coach/guru??

Your work, idolising design, pattern and decoration and often imbued with a hint of the ‘dressing up box’, is laboriously made by the human body, using craft techniques associated with feminised labour. How did your interest in these domestic skills initially come about and how much of it is bound up in your own autobiography?

I learnt to sew from my nan. She sometimes looked after me when my mum was at work and being an older nan meant that she took care of me in front of the TV and showed me how to knit and sew – I loved it! Later it was my mum who passed on her sewing skills – the basic blanket stitch which is a bit of a staple within my work was taught by her. I’ve always said my childhood role models were three women: my nan, my mum and my sister. And I see them entwined in the work that I make. I believe these mediums have an honesty and integrity to them and are incredibly empowering. Being able to make work and construct work by hand – especially in the early days was incredibly important to me. Today, I am lucky enough to incorporate elements that I do make myself and I think the work is all the stronger for it.

Let’s talk about your palette. Is it pastel pink, sickly pink, candy-coloured pink or flesh pink? Is colour integral to your work and on the flip side, is colour an important tool for the viewer to translate or decode your work?

Firstly, it is flesh pink but I like that it is also all of those other pinks. I love that it is one colour that has so many associations. Pink also has associations with childlike innocence so it becomes another tool with which I bring together opposing forces and I subvert and distort its reading with uncanny or darker elements.

For this show, you will animate your new work with performances by Vancouver’s Kokoro Dance Company who will interact with your new commissions in Dilston Grove in bespoke, sculptural costumes. This is not the first time you have worked with performance artists and have made costumes for them. How did this collaboration come about with this Japanese butoh dance company and why the fascination with adorning the live human body in relation to your sculptural installations?

I was first introduced to Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget of Kokoro Dance through the curator of a show I had in Vancouver – Tobin Gibson in 2014. Tobin had organised for them to perform within my show, wear some sculptural costumes I had on display and activate some of the objects. We hit it off immediately and both expressed a keen interest in working together in the future. In 2015, they invited me to design the set and costumes for their piece ‘The Book of Love’. Inviting them to come to the UK has long been a dream of mine and I’m very happy they have agreed to it. I had no prior experience of Butoh dance before working with them but I think what they do is incredibly powerful and a wonderful antidote to a lot of performance at the moment in contemporary art which seems to be focused on the young, bodies, complacency and posing. 

Credits

Images 1-3 and 6: Jonathan Baldock, installation shot of “There’s No Place Like Home” at CGP London (Dilston Grove), 2017, Photo: Damian Griffiths

Images 4-5: Jonathan Baldock, installation shot of “There’s No Place Like Home” at CGP London (The Gallery), 2017, Photo: Damian Griffiths.

Image 7: Jonathan Baldock, installation shot of “Love Life: Act II” at The Grundy, Blackpool (collaborative exhibition by Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart), 2017, Photo: Ian Brown.

Image 8: Jonathan Baldock, installation shot of “Toilers of the Sea” at Hull Maritime Museum, Hull (collaborative exhibition by Jonathan Baldock and Ian J Brown), 2017, Photo: Ian Brown.

Links

Jonathan Baldock: There’s No Place Like Home, CGP London (15 June – 30 July 2017): http://cgplondon.org/jonathan-baldock/

Artist’s website: http://jonathan-baldock.com

Offshore: artists explore the sea, Hull Maritime Museum, Hull (1 April – 2 July 2017): http://invisibledust.com/project/offshore-artists-explore-the-sea/ 

Love Life: Act 2 (two person touring show with Emma Hart), The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (17 June – 12 August 2017): https://www.grundyartgallery.com/programme/forthcoming/

Belmacz Gallery, London: http://www.belmacz.com/artists/baldock_jonathan

Nicelle Beauchene, New York: http://nicellebeauchene.com/artists/jonathan-baldock/

About the Artist

Jonathan Baldock (b. 1980, Pembury, UK) graduated from The Royal College of Art in 2005. He has exhibited internationally, recent shows include: Offshore: Artists Explore the Sea, Hull Maritime Museum; SPACE Gallery, London; Love Life: Acts 1,2 & 3 (touring show with Emma Hart), Peer Gallery, London, The Grundy, Blackpool and De La Warr Pavilion (forthcoming); Conversation Piece/ Part 3, Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Baldock, Pope, Zahle, Northern Gallery of Contemporary Arts (NGCA), Sunderland; Notes from the Orifice, VITRINE Gallery, London (UK); The Soft Machine, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff; Hot Spots, The Apartment, Vancouver; A Strange Mix Between a Butcher’s Shop and a Nightclub, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge. He has received international awards and residencies, including: Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral Residency (2015), Abbey Fellowship, British School in Rome, Italy (2013); Residency – The Forest, Wysing Art Centre Cambridge, UK (2012); and Skowhegan, School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Maine, USA (2007). Jonathan Baldock is represented by Belmacz, London and Nicelle Beauchene, New York.

For her first solo show, Welsh artist Sarah Roberts travels to the Costa del Sol, creating an all-enveloping five-dimensional monochromatic installation at BLOCK 336 in London entitled Torremolinos-Tableaux-Tongue-Twister (After Sun) (on until 6^th May 2017). This site-specific immersive exhibition is the second act to a 2016 day-time version of the beach in Torremolinos that was exhibited at HaHa Gallery in Southampton.  As day moves into night, colours change. The pink flesh of bodies on the beach mutates into red – suggesting sun-burnt skin, red neon outside a nightclub or a spectacular sunset. In this exhibition, the viewers’ senses are completely overwhelmed with dozens of different surface textures they want to touch, atomisers spewing out the scent of sun cream, a sound piece of waves crashing on the beach and the ruddy pigmentation of the entire space.  Red LED lights from above illuminate hundreds of objects that are either laying on the floor, leaning up against the wall or reclining on plinths, all of which are scarlet-tinged (including two tons of rubescent gravel poured onto the floor in the shape of a tongue). The objects include hand-cast plaster pieces, found objects, hand-printed textile pieces, glass, rubber and glitter. Living between London and Wales, Roberts writes poetry as well as makes sculptural installations that are obsessed with their surfaces and how they mirror the everyday world, recalling architecture, landscape and body in form and colour.

Congrats on your first solo show at BLOCK 336 in Brixton! As a viewer, it was a mesmerising experience for me, playfully engaging all of my senses. Instead of looking at each of the individual objects, the monochromatic aspect of the show forces you to dwell on the entirety of the installation. As the artist, how do you intend the viewer to interact with this all-consuming installation? Do you attempt to curate the viewer’s experience through the employment of excess?

Thank you! This has been my first opportunity to create something on this scale, and something that is in turn a fully encapsulated immersive experience so its nice to hear that your senses were aware of being catered for in the journey through it.

In terms of leading the viewer – I’d like to think I’m not directing their journey through the installation beyond the physical pathways that are created; maybe I’m more researcher and set designer. I want to lead the viewer to a space that’s akin to a [very present] stage set of the everyday made anew, somewhat credible and entirely real, part unfinished and very much made for a viewer to discover themselves, and in that act of discovery, to activate it.

When I’m researching for new palettes, I seek out places that show me their edges, their constructedness, facades, or ideas of underneaths.  I don’t see these faces as veneers or fakes but as very real material surfaces, the actuality of things.  The plastic paradise of a truly blue hotel spa, furred up purple carpet tiles, pinks plastered on walls as dripping renders, wet sand furrowed and grained, pressed into with bony fleshed out toes - all up for grabs. I’ve loved Vegas casinos, desert landscapes, Welsh hinterlands, and now here – the sun-down-lit strip of the Costa del Sol that is Torremolinos.

And about the excess, well yes, maybe if left alone with less, the viewer may have time to start making sense of things, to covet the object, to attribute the value of artwork to things; whereas here in the conversant and non-hierarchical material repeats, I hope viewers will focus on looking at the materiality of things or at best wanting to touch.

Personally, I was very drawn toward the hand-crafted objects in the installation – the screen-printed textiles and wall vinyls and the cast plaster pieces. Do you see these as able to exist on their own as individual artworks outside of the installation context? Or does your practice only allow for an installation type of presentation?

No, not at the moment.  I actually find words or collage easier ways of representing ideas in smaller utterances. I use collage a lot in the preparation for a piece; it’s key in my research process.

Once I start making, the connectivity between the excess seems essential.  It’s like the pieces all form an alphabet, and trying to exist alone, they are just the beginning or end of some sentence, never the core of it - they really are surfaces. Maybe this can change as my vocabulary strengthens, but for now, once things become 3D matter, it gets trickier; things gain this unwarranted value, trying to make sense and coming back senseless.

My practice as a maker has a focus on labour and production. I produce multiple repeats in a day, all different takes on a sensation, all chatting, and all growing into some overall sense of a new place.  I am my own factory, and I access others who operate out there in the ‘real world’ of manufacturing to create things as well, and these are of equal stature, getting something absurd made to spec - where you can hardly notice it’s bespoke without closer inspection - is something I adopt a lot.

I have a special and fleeting relationship with each piece I make, and then each piece slips a little into the next and into the whole. I want that thing I have hand-cast to sit, with a sense of purposeful slippery belonging, alongside found plastic objects or those bespoke manufactured absurdities - all equals, all matter.  I think this is what throws us into an experience of looking - me out there on the promenade in Torremolinos, and the viewer here in its Tongue-Twister counterpart at Block 336.

For this show, you wrote a free verse poem that was included in the press release.  When planning an exhibition, what comes first for you – the poetry or the visual components of the show?

I use words at all stages of the process - to record places and their sensations. I write emails to myself, like material memoirs, hashtag haikus.  Much like the materials of the installation, they get sculpted, become a collection of collisions, and seek to perform a function but slide into phonic performance kept together by proximity of placement and somehow making sense even at points of disjuncture.  I began writing this poem in a café in Torremolinos and finished it on the tube after a site visit to Block 336.

In this poem, the opening line is “Her tongue twisted around names and melting ice pops as the dark closed in on the pinks and the sky clouded into sticky reds”. It is an incredible introduction to the show, giving the reader many clues to what they are about to encounter visually as well as aurally and olfactorily. Is it essential for the viewer to engage with your writing before or after viewing your work?

The poems are gobbets, non-narrative descriptions of the material encounters rather than a map of this new space.  So no, they are not essential; they are not a precursor nor an afterthought. They are simply another thing.

In the past, your artworks had a strong tie to your own Welsh heritage, possessing titles in both Welsh and English and exploring the chroma of the Mid Wales countryside. How important is your own autobiography to your practice? 

I believe Welshness runs through me and my practice like a granite seam. The older I get, the more I experience a sense of hiraeth [which translates as homesickness but more as a sense of longing for the land] when I spend too long away from Wales. The landscape back home is as tactile as it is visual. I grew up in a small town, a strip village nestled between rock and sea right in the middle, right on the coast.  In the face of epic variegated terrain, tiny terraced dwellings become impotent teeth in crumbling pinks and blue hues against a backdrop of grey and green.  We didn’t have iPhones in the early nineties, just skinny legs, mountain bikes and a sense of owning the rock from our bunk-beds whilst waiting for the summer season.

I now live and work between Wales and London. It’s perfect. Each place is as intense and revelatory as the other, and they keep each other blindingly visible.  I think this has an undeniable effect on my practice.  I will never get bored of working with Wales.

Given that words are part of your artistic metier, is the Welsh language something you wish to preserve in this world of disappearing languages?

Welsh was my first language; as a child, I barely spoke English, and now I lose words daily. My accent is unrecognisable. It’s an upsetting sensation of loss, both of belonging and of the fragility of our ability to communicate.  It’s also fascinating; my words have become more material than ever as they trip and tumble from my mouth.  I’m obsessed with the awkwardness of Google Translate and its limitations.  I think being bilingual as a kid helped me to articulate.  I chose words for their meaning, but also their phonics, their performativity. I circumnavigated them from the other tongue like one might a sculpture. I do this when I write, often using translations in texts or titles.  In fact, I seem to love the imagery of tongues too!

I’m definitely interested in preserving language, and not for nostalgic reasons. I genuinely believe that multiple languages can add to our ability to perform proper attempts at articulation. I’m relearning my mother tongue to an adult grade now. It’s like my vocabulary was fixed when I left Wales at 18.

For your installations included in The London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2015 and Saatchi Art New Sensations in 2014, a single colour was not the focal point; instead, a panoply of surfaces, faux and real, barraged the viewer.  From a white plastic electrical fan to a scattering of hand-cast plaster bowls in a rainbow of colours and from a roll of LED strip lights to wallpaper and swatches of silk printed with a photographic image of polystyrene, texture seems like a key driver in your practice.  Do you agree? Could you talk further on this point?

‘Barraged’ is a nice way to put it.  That’s how I feel when I find these places in the first place.  Buffered by winds, accosted by colour. Dribbling internally at the sheer deliciousness of the surface textures.

My practice centres around this collection of the actuality of the surfaces of the world; when researching, I collect images of walls, floors, sand - all texture, colour or form.  The distilling of these textures starts here. I don’t see it as a reduction to colour, texture and form – its more like a making visible of it.  The images are repeated into forms, poured into plasters,  smoothed into ceramics and printed on various substrates with sliding scales, sound, scents and more. For each place, the representation I create is led by the overall sensation of that place as I record it - sometimes places seep into a hue, other times their apparent colour blocks stick out shouting, and sometimes the air smells like sun cream.

AMPERSANDS (Fairbourne a& Margate a&) (2015), shown at Whitechapel, is a piece centered around excess, additions and the power of visually driven connections.  This piece collides two palettes through a forced additive connection and is slightly more frenetic and unnerving as a result. It’s full of of peeled-off textures of Margate’s visible arcadia and a bleak palette from a Welsh strip village that is slowly returning to the sea.  This insinuated theme park of edges and collisions of made matter, in multicolour hues with washed out rocky accents, hopefully makes us consider these created visual contexts.

ETO O Borth – Again from Borth (2014), shown at New Sensations, is from a hinterland in Mid Wales, a more direct presentation of one palette, a strip of terraced houses exposed to the land and the sea.  Its flimsy curtained ‘walls’ pull at the edges, suggesting Borth’s precarious positioning on the coastline and observing our belief in those tiny multi-coloured terraced invaders of the landscape.

Here in the reds at Block 336, this heavy lidded half light is an integral part of the encasing shell of the work.  I’m fascinated with the idea of our experience of colour being waves reflected off the surfaces. That we are making it red, SEEING RED. I’ve included light in many previous works as a material, a light, a bulb, a colour. This is the first time I have really considered its impact on our ways of seeing colour, its ability to shift the palette of a place depending on the time of day.

I tried to fix that moment of light into an experience of colour, and I love how its unfixable  and slips away from your eyes. I’m fascinated by this idea that the objects in a place can be different visible versions of themselves at different points in the day. The red is all-encompassing when you first encounter it and then fades as your retinas adjust to the light into salmon and oranges.  The lights were the first things I installed so I could get a real sense of this new space  – I had to keep going back out to the white light so I could see the reds again.  You are very aware of your place within it and your experience of the colours changing whilst you are in it - this apparent colour cover-up that is in fact a revelation of textures.

LINKS

BLOCK 336, London: http://block336.com

Artist’s website: http://www.sarahrobertsfa.com

About the Artist

Sarah Roberts is a Welsh artist currently living and working in London and Wales. She studied Sociology at the University of Leeds (BA 2001) before finishing a second BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London in 2014. Recent group exhibitions include SellYourSelf, East Street Arts, Leeds (2017); I’M Feeling So Virtual I’m Violent, HaHa Gallery, Southampton (2016); P A N D I C U L A T E : The Joy of Stretching, The Koppel Project, London (2016); The London Open 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015) and Saatchi Art New Sensations, Victoria House, Londn (2014). Roberts was selected for the Into The Wild Residency Programme, Chisenhale, London (2015-16) and the ACAVA/ArtQuest Lifeboat Residency (2014-15), and was awarded the Parasol Unit Exposure Award in 2014.

As seen on FAD Magazine: http://fadmagazine.com/2017/04/13/marcelle-joseph-interviews-artist-sarah-roberts/

Carla Busuttil’s third solo show at Josh Lilley in London entitled The Super-Suburb Defence Authority touches on all of the ills that have infected South Africa since its colonial era. As a South African artist growing up under apartheid but living and working outside her home country since moving to London to attend the Royal Academy Schools in 2005, Busuttil is able to look back on her native land with a dispassionate and impartial lens, picking up on all of the developments and setbacks of a country struggling to cleanse itself of its apartheid history. 

Consisting of painting, sculpture, video and bespoke artist wallpaper, this exhibition actively engages the viewer, whether interested in the politics or not, as the installation is a master class in exhibition making and the politically and culturally-charged subject matter is understated, drawing the viewers in instead of slapping them on the face.  In the first room of the exhibition, there is a large seemingly innocent painting of six school boys in their uniforms painted in a lurid yellow colour, with their school’s motto printed on the top left corner of the canvas: “Our motto is achieve. And success we will achieve.” Inspired by a school photo of the artist’s husband’s secondary school class in South Africa where he was forced to learn the Afrikaans language that only 13% of the South African population understands, this painting is quintessential Busuttil – revolving around the human form, painted in an abstract contemporary style, using a painterly brushstroke, and touching on the political landscape of a vibrantly coloured South Africa. In the same room, the viewer is confronted with four thickly-impastoed primitive faces reminiscent of African masks but painted on vintage cricket pads found in thrift shops in England, subtly pointing to South Africa’s colonial past.  Presented on traditional gallery plinths, these sculptures are all titled Nightwatchman, alluding to the overall theme of this exhibition exploring the South African private security industry that employs more people than the police force and army combined. 

In the downstairs gallery spaces, another thought-provoking painting of a car park guard intrigues the viewer as the man’s face is painted blue, matching the painting’s ground and hinting at racial tension, social unrest and the giant chasm between the rich and the poor.  Continuing this leitmotif, Busuttil presents for the first time in the UK the video she produced after extensive research in Johannesburg called Mosquito Lightning, a parody advertisement of the private security firm the artist founded while on a residency there earlier this year.  Presented on top of bespoke artist wallpaper, this video work is equal parts humour and terror as the entire private security industry profits from fear and its amplification in order to fulfil its corporate promise to eradicate it. This emphasis on the fear of the “other” in society has universal applications at the present moment, whether it be president-elect Trump promising to ban all Muslims from entering the United States or the British majority who voted for Brexit this summer in order to stop immigration into the UK. So through Busuttil’s window with a view of suburban South Africa, the viewer has a glimpse of its own political realities in present-day London.

All in all, this exhibition is definitely worth a visit (on until 23 December 2016) for Busuttil’s tantalising painting technique as well as for its transporting qualities – from a grey wintry day in Fitzrovia to a colour-saturated, bright day in a privileged Johannesburg suburb.   

www.joshlilleygallery.com

As seen on FAD Magazine

About the Artist

Carla Busuttil (b.1982, Johannesburg, South Africa, lives and works in Oxford) studied at the Royal Academy, London, and University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Solo exhibitions include Choice. Click.Bait, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2016; A Change of Tongue, Space K, Seoul, 2014; and Generation V, Josh Lilley, London, 2013. Group exhibitions include We see (in) the Dark, Museum of Africa Design, Johannesburg, 2015; Creative London, Space K, Seoul, Gwacheon & Gwangju, 2012; and Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010.

After several other exhibitions in London this year, Glasgow-based France-Lise McGurn pulls out all the stops for her solo exhibition at Bosse & Baum in Peckham (on until 18^th December 2016).  Presenting her signature wall and floor paintings alongside her figurative paintings on canvas and a more experimental sound piece, McGurn titled the show Mondo Throb, referencing both the 1970’s mondo genre of exploitation filmmaking as well as  excited, inflamed body parts.  In stark contrast to her earlier work that fragmented the human body with a more innocent vibe, these paintings are erotically charged with the viewer treated to a parade of bodies and body parts, from one seated nude gazing upon a topless woman in repose to another nude woman masturbating.  The titling of the paintings is revelatory as well (e.g., Aerobics gives you herpes, Betty batteries and Hermione Hormone). 

The presentation of the paintings on canvas on top of the wall paintings brings to mind an orgy of limbs or a subtle nod toward club culture, an area of activity where McGurn is incredibly active in Glasgow. She runs a club night residency at the poetry club in Glasgow, in collaboration with Katie Shannon, called DAISIES, where they invite DJs and artists to contribute to the décor and installation.  The floor paintings and artist-rigged lighting in the gallery space further contribute to that club ambience with the random squiggles of paint on the concrete floor suggestive of the stains and detritus left behind after a wild and crazy night on the dancefloor.

McGurn’s work is developed from her personal archive of collected imagery and moving image files. For this body of work, ecstasy was the focus, and the artist culled imagery from multiple sources from film, television, music and visual culture – from softcore and sexploitation films such as Emanuelle (1974) and Nine and a Half Weeks (1986) to illustrations for Happy Families decks of cards (1939). A visit to this exhibition is strongly recommended whether you are looking for carnal ecstasy or divine ecstasy.  It is a visual feast for the eyes.

For those living in Glasgow, look out for McGurn’s work at the Pipe Factory in February 2017.

http://www.bosseandbaum.com

http://www.thepipefactory.co.uk/programme/

All photos courtesy of the artist and Bosse & Baum. Photo credit: Oskar Proctor

As seen on FAD Magazine

About the Artist

France-Lise McGurn (b. 1983, Glasgow) lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated with a BA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 2005 and with an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2012.  Selected exhibitions include: Nomadic Vitrine, Recent Activity, Birmingham (October 2016); Felicity Black, Vertical Vulnerability, Caustic Coastal (October 2016); The Old Things, Crévecoeur, Paris (July 2016); Sexting, Kate Werble Gallery, New York (July 2016); At Home Salon: Double Acts, Marcelle Joseph Projects, Ascot (May 2016); Only with a light touch will you write well, freely and fast, Supplement, London (2016) and David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2015); NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH! Evelyn Yard, London (2016); 3am (solo), Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2015); A collaboration with Marianne Spurr, Studio Leigh, London (2015); Nos Algae’s, a performance at Tramway, Glasgow (2014). She was part of collaborative performance Amygdala N.O.S with Kimberley O’Neill and Cara Tolmie at South London Gallery (2015), for the launch of Love your Parasites, edited by Camilla Wills, which she also contributed to. Upcoming exhibitions include France-Lise McGurn, Zoe Williams & Urara Tsuchiya at The Pipe Factory, Glasgow (February, 2017).

Crimson balloons festooning the ceiling, a black and white checkerboard dance floor under foot, shimmery white curtains partially covering views of the Manhattan skyline… I could be walking into a cocktail party of an Upper East Side socialite married to a one-percenter.  Instead, I find myself in the gallery space of Arcadia Missa under the railway arches in Peckham for Amalia Ulman’s latest solo show entitled Labour Dance (until 5th November 2016).

Ulman, an LA-based Argentinian artist who grew up in Spain before moving to London to attend Central St Martins art college, is widely known for her Excellences and Perfections durational Instagram performance in 2014 where she played the part of a beautiful, vacuous young woman in LA doing the things that beautiful, vacuous young women do in LA: shopping, dating, exercising, having a boob job – all documented daily by selfies taken with her blinged-out iPhone camera. Call her the Kim Kardashian of the art world. As the vanguard of the social media performance practice, Ulman has taken to Instagram once again this year for a six-month performance entitled Privilege where a purportedly pregnant Ulman and her pet pigeon Bob mime office politics from her studio in a downtown LA block of offices filled with lawyers, accountants and beknownst to them an art world superstar.

Whether Ulman’s feathered co-star is her boss, colleague or alter ego is open to interpretation. Each Monday, Ulman posts a hand-drawn cartoon inspired by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti of the artist dressed as a clown with Bob often perching on her head.

Going IRL from URL is often tricky but Ulman pulls out all the stops for this exhibition, creating an immersive installation in a square space that mimics the format of her Instagram feed that is diligently followed by 126,000 people and counting. A coherent colour scheme runs throughout the online artwork and gallery space as if the artist was advised by a corporate branding executive  – white, black, red and shades of grey.

Video clips from her Instagram performance are looped on two chunky TV screens placed on the floor of the gallery, largely critiquing the dominant aesthetic of power and legitimacy that drives today’s capitalist engine forward.  Deflated red ceramic balloons are scattered around the space, referencing the state of a woman’s breasts post-childbirth. The ‘labour dance’ of the exhibition’s title becomes clear when I glance at the press release that features headlines and social media feeds about pregnant women ‘dancing their babies out’. One headline particularly piques my interest: “Pregnant Lady Twerks til her water breaks TOO FUNNY”. With Ulman’s Privilege performance due to end on election day in America, I cannot help but wonder what the climax will be: Ulman dancing to Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ and giving birth to a miniature Donald Trump covered in grey feathers?

With museum shows at Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year, Ulman returns to London, all dressed in red and turning her nose up at capitalist society’s obsession with slaving away in office cubicles to afford the ‘Gucci lifestyle’ of celebrity culture. Make sure you do not miss this exhibition.

arcadiamissa.com

Instagram: @marcelle.joseph

As seen on FAD Magazine

All Photos: Courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa

About the Artist

Amalia Ulman (born 1989, Argentina) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA after graduating from Central St Martins in 2011 (BA Fine Art). Recent solo exhibitions include: James Fuentes, Los Angeles (2016); James Fuentes, New York, Mama, Rotterdam, and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (all 2015); LTD, Los Angeles and Smart Objects, Los Angeles (both 2014); Marbriers4, Geneva, Future Gallery, Berlin, and Steve Turner, Los Angeles (both 2013). Selected group exhibitions include: Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London, and Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London (all 2016); The St. Petersbourg Paradox, Swiss Institute, New York, Poetry will be made by all, LUMA FOUNDATION, Zurich, and DISOWN, RedBull Studios, New  York (all 2014). Ulman’s work will be presented by Arcadia Missa at Paris Internationale 2016 (19-23 October 2016).