67 Great Titchfield St, London W1W 7PT
PART I
Attempts to decode, dispense with or otherwise divest oneself from the prevailing expectations and prior exploits of our predecessors are at the forefront of THE TAGLI’s latest group exhibition Containers: Part I, with five artists examining how artworks can both accommodate for and alter established stereotypes surrounding society, masculinity, archaeology, architecture and anthropology. Employing memory as a primary working methodology, either collective, imagined or artificial, each artist proffers a rewriting or remaking of the past in their own image, presenting vessels that hold and house their own alternative, artistic doctrines.
Religious reliquaries, sculpted stations of the cross and altarpiece panel paintings all serve as inspiration for William Lowry’s own monuments to modern masculinity and societal remembrance. Devotional in their dimensions, his etched copper panels - normally a precursor to the printing process - present forgotten figures navigating at once familiar and yet uncanny landscapes littered with floodlights, pylons and retractable cubicle curtains, while the artist’s paintings play with traditional perspectives, as analogous embodiments of a ‘great creator’ loom over miniature maquettes, admiring former or future feats of architecture and engineering. Existing in unspecified time periods, part contemporary classical, part archaeologically androgynous, Lowry’s own scale-models of opulent Ozymandian opuses stand as speculative reminders to humanity’s hubris and a desire to outperform our innate insignificance.
A similar interest in sculptures' ability to examine, expose and undermine inherent hierarchies is evidenced in Salvatore Pione’s facades - facsimiles of architecture made to encase or enclose that he would encounter within the gilded cage of his native Southern Italy. The accumulated pasts of wood panelled walls, slatted fences and wrought iron railings are recreated using stain, blackener and shellac to achieve artificially aging, performatively patinated to question the importance placed on entrenched societal structures. Elsewhere, a hand-carved, oversized umbrella wilts under its own weight, the erstwhile shelter serving as a memorial to frailty, fragility and the strength of vulnerability. Throughout his practice, Pione co-opts and subverts conventional craftsmanship techniques, with woodworking and ironworking imbuing each artwork with the memory of their own making, meticulous to the point of masochism.
Such memories held within an object are of equal interest to Nika Neelova, whose practice of ‘reverse archeology’ seeks to uncover the anthropological histories embedded within discarded or discontinued items. Adamant that form persists as a reflection of former functionality, blown-glass lamp shades are revived and re-contextualised, encircled by various veneers and set within jesmonite casts to act as gorgoneion reliefs, Grecian amulets prized for their apotropaic abilities. Alongside, the artist’s own fingerprints scar the surface of a ceramic slate, at once reprising the ridges found in fossilised sea beds at the Natural History Museum and imitating the topography of a dwindling collection of formerly thriving thermokarst lakes spread throughout northern Siberia, both reminders of humans ability to interfere and intrude upon nature’s organic order.
Nearby, the characteristically prominent warp and weft of Piers Alsop’s preferred jute canvas backing become an absorbent ground to retain the artist’s astute observations on everyday existence. The paintings appear as theatrical backdrops to staged sets that sit awaiting activation, populated by civic architecture, suburban street furniture and the indications of past urban planning. Imbued with the dark humour and social realism typified by British kitchen sink dramas, the artist approaches abstraction and ambiguity with an awareness of their allure, instead situating each shadowy vignette within an imminent, implied narrative as yet unknown to its audience.
A similar appreciation for a world-building that continues outside of the confines of the canvas is demonstrated in Heeyoung Noh’s painting practice, where recurring settings, characters and symbolistic motifs are employed to epitomise the complexities and precarities of diasporic identity, speaking to the artist’s own lived experience of otherness as an East Asian woman residing in the United Kingdom. Exposing the generational trauma bonds that exists amongst a family’s female lineage, Communal Korean bathhouses and crumpled silk sheets host Noh’s nude figures, while water droplets and the looming presence of a menacing black hound serve as visual stand-ins for these subconscious scars of systemic, state-sponsored oppression and a pervading, patriarchal social structure.
Exhibition text written by Hector Campbell
Part II - A solo presentation of Lucas Dupuy takes place at the same time on the lower floor of the gallery.
