With Abella D’Adamo, Adele Warner, Bridget Stehli, Emily Taylor, Emryn Ingram-Shute, Erin Murphy, Frances Waite, Grace Anderson, Nicola Smith, and Taylor Steel
Sky at Bus Projects
With Zoe Jackson, Lei Lei Kung, Pip Lennon, Emir West, Sarah Rosengarten, Maia Taber, and Antigone Yannoulidis
Documentation: Christo Crocker, courtesy of Bus Projects
Badge (red), synthetic polymer paint, modelling clay, drum skin, balsa, iron, resin, 2024
Documentation: Nicholas Mahady
Text for Hana Earles, Fiction at Triest
The beautiful grisette looked sometimes at the gloves, then sideways to the window, then at the gloves, and then at me. I was not disposed to break silence. I followed her example: so, I looked at the gloves, then to the window, then at the gloves, and then at her, and so on alternately. I found I lost considerably in every attack: she had a quick black eye, and shot through two such long and silken eyelashes with such penetration, that she look'd into my very heart and reins. It may seem strange, but I could actually feel she did.
- Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
The name of model Nara Smith’s newborn daughter is Whimsy Lou. Whimsy is the third of three siblings, her sister Rumble Honey and her brother, Slim Easy. Juliet Mitchell’s psycho-analytical study of familial relations extends on the well traversed analysis of hierarchical parent-child relations and illuminates the oft ignored lateral one between siblings. One of Mitchell’s observations is that the murderous rage and jealousy that erupts between siblings is practice for later navigation of social relationships operating on a similar lateral axis. Her study proposes that instead of society and violence colliding as separate entities in abnormal circumstances, violence is rather a part of the fabric from which society is constructed.
The term grisette emerged from 17th century France to describe a particular type of young working class woman. The grisette worked as a shop assistant or seamstress, often skirting the promiscuity stitched to this underclass world. Their dresses were made from a simple and inexpensive gray cloth, hence the french gris (gray) forms the prefix of the term and the suffix -ette denotes the feminine gender. The grisette has been characterized as amorous and intellectually ambitious. A fixture of bohemian life, she entangled herself with artists, oftentimes as a muse, model or lover. In La Grisette, Jules Janin’s Jenny chose only to model for the artists whom she deemed to be geniuses. In pursuing them, she refused (at least for a time) to comply with the trajectory of upward social mobility achieved by courting the affections of the bourgeoisie.
There are types of girls - Bruh, waif, gamine. Pear. Schizo-affective disorder gf, mother.
When did you first realize you couldn't marry your father? The imago refers to a figure, like a parent, so influential to the subject that it becomes a model through which she forms an understanding of the other. Within the phrase “anime girl” there is a hidden exclamation of self discovery, An I, me girl. ‘An I’ and ‘me girl’, I am myself, a girl! The crude use of confused pronouns mimics a kind of proto-speech, like the stage of infancy when one is first manifesting an ego, a recognition of one’s own reflection in the mirror.
Interior Decoration: Recent Paintings by Anabel Robinson
Ooh, let the light in
At your back door yelling 'cause I wanna come in
Ooh, turn your light on
Look at us, you and I, back at it again
- LANA DEL REY, LET THE LIGHT IN
If we were to enter a painting the way we enter a room, we would first start with the door. The door of the painting may be the stretcher bar. Just as a door visually disappears behind us when we enter a room, the stretcher bar is invisible as we enter the painting. Perhaps at times there is a peripheral vision of it, but mostly it is something that recedes before it can be perceived. Psychologically, we may experience the door as the structural scaffolding that holds up the room. This is just an illusion, of course, because the room is supported by its walls. The painting’s walls are the painting’s edge, or frame. The edge of a painting is what delineates the painting from not-painting, or the rest of the world. The room itself is defined by space, an absence to be filled. This is the canvas, or painting. Interior decoration fills the room. A painting can be lived in like a room is.
Informal Serving Accessories at TCB
Untitled, cardboard, oil paint, light bulb, 35 x 26.5 x 65 cm, 2023
Spirit Level 5, papier-mâché, spray paint, pin, ribbons, plastic poppy, button, 24 x 15 x 19 cm, 2023
I Like Sincerity, cardboard, matchsticks, matchbox, feather, cellophane, acrylic paint, 12.5 x 14 x 6 cm, 2023
Spirit Level 6, papier-mâché, spray paint, 20 x 21 x 19 cm, 2023
Critic Goes God, polyurethane resin, spray paint, nail polish, 10 x 8 x 5 cm, 2023
Run To The Rescue With Love, polyurethane resin, spray paint, nail polish, inkjet print, cardboard box, tissue paper, 12 x 22 x 17 cm, 2023
Spirit Level 2, papier-mâché, spray paint, ribbons, feather, 53 x 40 x 30 cm, 2023
Peace Will Follow, matchbox, buttons, ribbon, matchstick, inkjet print, acrylic paint, 5 x 2.5 x 13.5 cm, 2023
Photography: Nicholas Mahady
Informal Serving Accessories, Gemma Topliss, TCB Gallery, [3rd - 20th August, 2023]
A dollhouse style reconstruction of Kurt Cobain’s cabin made out of blue cellophane, cardboard, matchsticks and matchboxes painted black. A pair of red apple sculptures engraved with tiny prints of two tragic dead stars respectively accompanied by the phrases “critic goes God” and “R.P” (or is it R.I.P?). A black box carved with a female pictogram and lit up red as it precariously dangles upside down. Not quite spherical black papier-mâché sculptures prod out like a strangely alluring dead stare or an alien planet’s gravitational pull while a few austere adornments of ribbons, poppies and pins grant them a slightly more human feel. Constructed out of old newspapers, fragmented headlines still seep through to the surface and align in a constellation of concrete chance poems. One sculpture in a greater state of decomposition than all the rest—or perhaps transformation…—collapses in on itself like the singularity at the invisible heart of a black hole, the last remains of a dying star forever memorialized in its final spasms.
How is anything like this even possible? How can we be looking at something that by its very nature should be imperceptible, unimaginable? What we appear to be facing here is a paradoxical self-effacing. What haunts us here is the overwhelming presence of an absence, the sublime, almost mystical experience of non-experience, gnawing away at us like rat bites left behind with no other trace of this life in sight. The concrete manifestation of a sheer abstraction. A hole in space. X. “I see it, but I don’t believe it.” This shouldn’t be here, but it is. Something that is oddly familiar and has a certain human touch, but that is too far off to make out, too far gone to recollect, too blinding to see, too sublime to take it all in. Something a little like all creation. God struck a match and the universe lit up in a big bang, a great ball of fire. Just like that, all these planets, stars and homes arose out of nothing. Creation ex nihilo. But that’s all yesterday’s news now. After the headline of God’s demise has long since faded, we still have our celebrities and false idols to worship and defile. They form a cycle only becoming ever more fragmented, quickly forgotten and then stripped of all sense as everything only heats up and speeds up. That’s the life of a supernova, an exploding star as it disappears inside itself under the weight of its own gravitational collapse—or gossip column. The latest celebrity meltdown marching arm in arm with the cosmic flow of entropic time. What you can see will then no longer exist, and perhaps never did except as whatever traces, marks, wounds and sweet promises it leaves engraved on you, like the initials on a tree of a couple who are no more. And “so we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”
- Vincent Lê
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