“a mouse named Steamboat Willie”
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This Week
💦 titular shaped spheres
💦 cashmere-clad swans
💦 hotties giving their two cents
Events
A cheerful one this week we promise, despite everyone going down with strep throat (yes, the childhood illness) *and* the terrible news of the tube strikes being called off?! In God’s name we were praying for that extra week working from home (bed). Lean with us into Victorian Woman Winter (we’re thinking confined to the house / servile, weak) but pls no hysteria… that is unless you find yourself *not* in Margate this Sunday. Not only are there *three* 4pm PVs (within 2mins of each other), it’s also the last chance to catch ‘mood of dread’ group show at Turner Contemp and Alex Margo Arden’s solo at Quench. Read on to find out more… and cya at Kings Cross kids x
🧊 11 Jan | 6-8pm | Something Rotten, CASSIUS&Co. [Hyde Park Corner]
🧊 11 Jan | 6-9pm | Unyimeabasi Udoh: Withdrawing, Kip [Burgess Business Park, SE5 7TJ] *new space alert*
🧊 12 Jan | 6-8pm | Ocean Balucombe-Toppin and Ebun Sodipo: Constellations, NEVEN [Bethnal Green]
🧊 12 Jan | 6-8pm | Mathis Gasser: Heroes and Ghosts, Brunette Coleman [Holborn]
🧊 12 Jan | 6-8pm | Michael Simpson: New Paintings, Modern Art [Old Street]
🧊 12 Jan | 6:30pm | Esther Gatón and Carole Ebtinger: 𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘦 (exhibition walkthrough), South Parade [Farringdon]
🧊 13 Jan | 1-6pm | Opening of Emalin’s The Clerk’s House [Shoreditch] 🚨*new space alert* 🚨
🧊 13 Jan | 6pm | Anya Gorkova: In the Darkroom (performance), South Parade [Farringdon] | Free, rsvp: info @ southparade.biz
🧊 14 Jan | From 4pm | Nat Faulkner: Days at Roland Ross; Lizzy Deacon and Ika Schwander: Prosecco Wisdom at 243 Luz; India Nielsen: Time is with me now at Well Projects [Northdown Road, Margate]
🧊 15 Jan | 7pm | Worms Book Club: Julia Fox’s Down the Drain (hosted by Rose Easton), Reference Point [Temple]
Exhibition of the Week
Unlife: Part II at Soft Opening, until 10 Feb, info here
Unlife: Part II at Soft Opening (curated by gallery artist Maren Karlson) departs from Guercino’s painting Arcadia, which depicts two shepherds’ unwittingly discovering a skull in their Utopian garden – even in paradise death is present, goes the moral of this story. Whenever I see this painting, I’m reminded of Tom Stoppard’s play of the same name. Written in 1993, it tells parallel stories set in the same country house some 200 years apart, with interlinking, overarching themes – in classic Stoppardian fashion – like sex, death, science and philosophy. In the opening scene, 19th century Thomasina, precocious – and honestly a bit annoying – asks her tutor if jam, stirred into rice pudding, could ever become unstirred. And so the plot briskly unravels, with entropic flair.
At Soft Opening, the exhibition text focuses on objects’ permeability with those around them. The works are situated in relation to one another, existing in the jammy-pudding-ness of things, particularly evident in the tension between Brook Hsu and Martin Wong’s works. The former’s staccato brushstrokes pairing perfectly with Wong’s soupy textures and their even more gorgeous contrasting orangey-green tones.
Later, in Stoppard’s play, Thomasina concludes that it is sex, rather than death, which has permeated all aspects of life, bringing chaos with it. Sex seems to permeate Unlife, too, with many of the works possessing a sleek, self aware materiality that the gallery has become known for. Sarah Pucci’s bedazzled works, resembling jellies and bundt cakes, have a decadence that is nothing short of charming; while Jasmine Gregory’s sculptural assemblage looms over the gallery – a collection of objects equally reminiscent of both a wild house party and a crime scene.
The works in Unlife reflect a human need for remaking and reordering – wild attempts to pull apart and make sense of the chaos which permeates, and indeed structures, our lives. Like Thomasina’s pudding, it is often in the undoing of things that we find ourselves making something entirely new.
Hot Links
🐰 “Why the alt lit bunnies are obsessed with a ‘lost’ sex-crazed novel about 80s LA” – Literally say no more our interest is piqued !! Sammy Loren, of Casual Encounterz, delivers on this tale of the tantalising 40 year lead up to the launch of libidinous rollercoaster, The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker by Jack Skelley… it's wild.
👔 “the contemporary gallerin(a/x) is defined by their esoteric, bleeding-edge taste, just as at home at Groucho as they are in a wretched techno squat party” – One of our fave December articles was by friend of the ‘sletter Joe Bobowicz on how gallerina style got weird for i-D. Hotties Daisy Sanchez, Helen Neven and Rose Easton all give their two cents…
😱 Mickey Mouse Has Entered the Public Domain, and Can Kill You Now – a century after creation, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse is now public intellectual property :0 ! Vanity Fair report on a horrifying scheme to turn a Disney mouse into a scary character that will ‘torment and terrorise’... ‘2024 is the year Mickey Mouse officially breaks bad,’ they say… yikes!
🪩 “Can a physical object still truly excite us, syphon and sustain our normally starved collective passions?” – Finally, the long read we have all been waiting for. In The Paris Review, Elena Buckley examines Las Vegas’s iconic Sphere, observing how the chief executive ‘understood something primal: we are, whether from the womb, or the firmament, or the telos of the atom… innately pulled toward the form of the sphere’. Explains…so much x
Add-to-cart
Our one, biggest, most regretful shopping regrets was… not buying Andre Leon Talley’s monogrammed LV luggage at auction last year. But - fear not. 2024 promises to be another salivating year for handbags at auction. Case in point, the ludicrously capacious Burberry bag from Succession is hitting the block this month. Birther of a thousand think pieces, this iconic piece of TV fashion is - sadly - probably going to go for well over our front desk salaries… *sigh*
Parting Shot
Cutting out the twaddle (“we are __delighted/thrilled/honoured___ to present the _first/largest/most exhaustive_ exhibition of __blahblahblah___”) Niru Ratnam graced us with a lovely run down of the history of his new gallery space (opening 18 Jan) in a recent email, and we couldn’t keep it just to ourselves (Niru, you only sent this to us, right?). Diving into Fitzrovia’s unique past life to quite an intense degree of detail / what some might call a World of Interiors-coded history lesson, we came away refreshed and rejuvenated - such rare sincerity in a blizzard of expansive language! We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: no one does it like Niru 😘
Love xoxo