Pointillist Trisha Paytas, a Backrooms dentist & psychological warfare
Some thoughts on London's spring group shows
For some reason, since going freelance I’ve struggled to squeeze out any decent reviews, so I’m getting back into the swing of things with this mini dump. I’m a bit late to the game as these shows have been open for a little while, but nevertheless, here are my thoughts on the group exhibitions I’ve seen so far this spring. Highlights include a pointillist Trisha Paytas, a rhinestoned Britney Spears and an etching of Elle Woods. My cup runneth over.
‘Briefly Gorgeous’ at Soho Revue
“There is some solace to be found in the way beauty can, for brief glimmers, be a connecting force that binds us in some sort of half-painful, half-joyful sisterhood club.”
Soho Revue’s delicious group show is a multi-layered dismantling of women’s relationship with their appearance, and it did not disappoint. It both satiated and needled my appetite for beautification and visual pleasure. Daisy Collingridge’s fleshy soft sculptures characterise a familiar grotesquerie hiding inside us all, while the subjects in Ada Bond’s paintings haunt and linger in a black abyss, like the seductive void Scarlett Johansson drags her prey into in Under the Skin.
Olivia Bryant’s 3D-pen drawings of net curtains and Morgane Ely’s intricate wood carvings of Legally Blonde and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days screencaps got me thinking about the psychic stringiness of beauty: how it’s intertwined with every facet of our lives, how it unravels over time, how its rituals bind and bond people whilst also existing as this gargantuan, oppressive beast built by men that we’re still slowly pulling apart.
‘Mood Swings’ at Norito Gallery
“Glamour in tragedy, tragedy in glamour.”
They had me at: “The curators’ shared point of departure is Britney Spears.” Curated by Gigi Surel and Elleanna Chapman, this is the kind of exhibition you can enjoy for the breadth of the works on show alone, which is one of the many things I loved about it. The exhibition was teased as an excavation of “the emotional whiplash of being a person who feels – and is seen feeling.” You’re reading the words of a textbook Cancer here, so I knew this would be right up my street.
Lily Bunney’s paintings of pop culture legends Trisha Paytas and Anna Nicole Smith shimmer as if viewed on a screen through tear-filled eyes. Meanwhile, Chapman’s gloriously weaponised kitsch portraits of Britney Spears and Leon Trotsky – made entirely of rhinestones – make revolution and misfortune flash before our eyes.
Another favourite was Moses Tan’s assemblage of a vintage Polly Pocket compact decked out with gums, teeth and a stone baoding ball. The piece rotated on a metal tray like something out of a Backrooms dentist’s office. I stood watching it for a while, stuck in a loop somewhere between girlhood nostalgia and the increasing urge to hack up some phlegm. All of these things are complimentary btw. Side note: there’s something incredibly satisfying about the saccharine mint green and pink colour combo.
Accompanying the show was Reframing Britney Spears, a talk with Elleanna Chapman and the iconic writer and Rehash podcast co-host Hannah Raine, where I learned that ‘Mood Swings’ was inspired by Britney’s heart-wrenching 2003 hit Everytime – the first song she wrote herself, where the pain from an old relationship was bared to the world.
Maybe the real mood swing was the Justin Timberlake hatred we felt along the way.
Millennial curators + foam art = psychological warfare
There was actually a third group show I had planned to see and naively anticipated that I would love, as I’m a big fan of one of the featured artists, but after seeing some previews of the opening night on Insta, I decided against it. If a show makes you say “eugh” out loud in an empty room, you should probably just trust your gut and stay at home. I refuse to go to a gallery exhibiting a bunch of neon foam sculptures that look like they were plucked from the waiting room of a disreputed child psychologist’s office. Instead, I spent the evening tweezing out ingrown hairs and clearing out my old nail polishes.
I guess the overall takeaway from this post is: why must women suffer???? omg