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