30th September – 5th November 2016
Victoria Adam, Adriano Amaral, Noah Barker, Luis Miguel Bendaña, Patrizio di Massimo, Justin Fitzpatrick, Lisa Holzer, Isaac Lythgoe, Vanessa Safavi
Organised by Attilia Fattori Franchini
‘No one can imagine – simply – merely; one must imagine within words or paint or metal, communicating genes or multiplying numbers. Imagination is its medium realized. You are your body – you do not choose the feet you walk in – and the poet is his language. He sees his world, and words form in his eyes just like the streams and trees there. He feels everything verbally. Objects, passions, actions …’
‘I am only a string of noises, after all – nothing more really – an arrangement, a column of air moving up and down, a queer of growth like a gall on a tree, a mimic of movement in silent readers maybe, a brief beating of wings and cooing of a peaceful kind, an empty swing still warm from your bloomers … ummm … imagine the imagination imagining … and surely neither male or female – there’s nothing female about a column of air, a gall on a tree – surely both, like bloomers on the swing’s seat… so I’m a spiky bush at least, I like to think, knotty and low growing, scratchy though flowering, a hawthorne would suit me.’
William H. Gass, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
The exhibition Lonesome Wife takes its title from ‘Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife’, a 1989 book by the experimental American novelist William H. Gass.
The book is narrated through the voice of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title. Disappointed by her inattentive husband, she engages in a breezy display of the varieties and visual qualities of language – diverse typefaces, speech bubbles, typographical experiments, in order to seduce a clandestine new lover, who is slowly revealed through the book as the Reader themself.
Using text as a starting point, Gass creates a parallel between a concrete use of language and the female body of Babs Masters, both employed as tools of persuasion, absorbing the reader-viewer in a game of intimate eclipse and revelation.
The exhibition looks at the multiple ways in which seduction can serve as narrative tool as well as an antidote to boredom and disinterest. The exhibited works hint at the body, the physicality of text and the linguistic capacity of objects; moving between the registers of form, process and content, to be read or to be felt.
Readings:
A glass is empty of everything but simple passage
Saturday 8th October, 6.30pm – 8pm
David Raymond Conroy, Caspar Heinemann, Rebecca Jagoe
As part of Lonesome Wife and in conjunction with Frieze East End Night, three artists have been invited to read a selection recent writings in response to the exhibition.
Noah Barker, (Voiceover), 2016
Adapted press release
21 x 29.7 cm
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Victoria Adam, Lost and sad (Diana), 2016
Bearded wheat, wheat, oat, elastic, beeswax, name-on-a-chain
78 x 16 x 16 cm
Patrizio di Massimo, Inductive Deductive (Mundus Muliebris), 2016
63 maiolica tiles, copper oxides
360 x 280 cm
Victoria Adam, Mermadoil plumage crease, 2016
Aluminum foil tray, perspex, resin, jesmonite, glass
Dimension variable
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Vanessa Safavi, No Omelette Without Breaking Eggs, (Holding Substitute IV), 2016
Metal, paint, soft PVC, cotton straps, foam, ginger biscuit, chopsticks
98 x 13 x 6 cm
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Isaac Lythgoe, blustery drags on the cigarettes, 2016
Perspex, led neon, crampons
180 x 100 x 40 cm
Victoria Adam, New Coil, 2016
Jesmonite, wheat, grass, glass, copper wire, dried beans, leather
33 x 15 x 5.5 cm
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Victoria Adam, Sunset Bathrooms (saturdays), 2016
Ceramic, aromatherapy calming massage oil, body piercing
27 x 13 x 3 cm
Lonesome Wife, Installation view, 2016
Luis Miguel Bendaña, Blush On A Man (Detail), 2015. Custom machine knit polyester, polyurethane, pen on paper, Xerox on paper.