“diamonds have been replaced with Marxism and acrylic nails”
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This Week
🧊 ceramic corsets, chains and latex
🧊 real Caroline Calloway energy and I won’t hear a word against it
🧊 i think i’m in love with martin herbert
Events
We’re back, semi-refreshed and slightly sunburnt. As the new school year kicks off, we’re returning to the grind and can’t wait to get out to our favourite galleries again! Highlights this week include Georgia Gardner Gray’s play at Sadie Coles, Olukemi Lijadu at V. O. Curations and Lewis Teague Wright at Ginny on Frederick. See you there, sweeties xxx
💦 8 September | 6 - 8pm (Play at 7pm) | Georgia Gardner Gray: NDE, Sadie Coles, Kingly Street [Oxford Street]
💦 8 September | 6-9pm | Wrestling: Patrick Cole & Dominic Watson, A.P.T Gallery and Studios [Deptford]
💦 8 September | 6-8pm | Olukemi Lijadu: Guardian Angel, V. O. Curations, Conduit Street [Oxford Street]
💦 8 September | 6-8pm | Kenneth Winterschladen: Divinity, South Parade [Debtford]
💦 9 September | 6pm | Sico Carlier, Trois Pièces Faciles (Three Easy Pieces), Queer Street Press Book Launch, ICA [Charing Cross]
💦 9 September | 6-9pm | Emanuel de Carvalho: new state, Guts Gallery [Hackney Downs]
💦 10 September | 5-8pm | Lewis Teague Wright: Floaters, Ginny on Frederick [Barbican]
Exhibition of the Week
Lucia Farrow & Elsa Rouy:"...and kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart made of salt and mud" at Kupfer Project Space, info here (now closed).
A thick, clear liquid drips between matted eyelashes in a photograph that hangs on a wall of taut, pink latex; nearby a vulva is pinned to the pink surface like stretched leather in a tannery. Etched into the photograph’s glossy finish is a reclined nude, milk streaming from one breast and a hand on their vulva. Shot by cult photographer Harley Weir, this series of images features the artists’ bodies fusing, wet with clay and encased by ceramic corsets, chains and latex. They are confrontational images that combine Weir’s fashion editorial background with the tactility of Farrow’s fleshy ceramics and the raw, wet-look figuration of Rouy’s paintings. If it sounds confusing that’s because it is - there are a lot of collaborations going on here, with Rouy producing some work with witty British-Australian painter, Ariane Heloise Hughes. I keep returning to the eye in the photograph that will forever gaze through the dribble of ‘transparent sea’ suspended between mascara’d lashes: out of an exploration of bloody, bodily-fluids-drenched sexuality vs the conventionally sweet and feminine rises a violent sense of agency re/claimed.
Hot links
💸 “shopping for baubles and using the biennials to network” – In this week’s edition of ‘i think i’m in love with martin herbert’ we would like to highlight one of his latest shrewd offerings: The Clout Chasers of the Art World, scandalously name dropping some art-market darlings and branding their audience as those ‘less interested in being challenged than in easy pleasure, hand holding and a quick profit’...
🍉 “He skips onstage with what has become the most corporate-friendly symbol of resistance, a rainbow flag” – The NYT goes in on Harry Styles (or Mr. Styles as he is referred to throughout) and opining that he is either queer-baiting or trapped in a closet of queer performativity. The jury is OUT
🍸 “a Molotov cocktail in a Mainbocher suit” – Ever since Valentino put out an all fuschia collection back in May, we knew it was a hot, hot pink summer. Amber Butchart suggests the trend might have less to do with childhood nostalgia, and more to do with ‘dopamine dressing,’ Marxism (yes) and #BimboTok.
🧃 “West rummages through Kardashian’s closet, trashing the gaudy clothes associated with her Paris Hilton-sidekick era” - spittle’s favourite instagram theorist M J Corey (aka Kardashian Kolloqium) has finally published her long-anticipated takedown of Kimye’s obsession with The Incredibles. Cue Barthes-riddled comparisons between Kim’s cultural ‘elasticity’ and Pixar’s Elastigirl, and Kanye’s shift from Mr. Incredible family-man to instagram’s most-watched villain.
🩴 ‘The resort is a remarkably sexless environment for somewhere so full of naked couples. There is a neutered, almost prelapsarian atmosphere.’ - For the FT, Imogen West-Knight seeks normcore bliss at the Tui Blue Seno all-inclusive resort in a tell-all and unbelievably charming article. ‘One of our friends told us that she went to the resort when she had her breakdown,’ she says. ‘Which is one of the chicest things anyone has ever said to me…’
Add-to-cart
The good people at TANK mag have launched a new book and carpet shop. Yes that’s right, carpets too – Persian ones, in fact. Every weekday for the next 4 weeks their pop up will be open on Gt Portland Street and we’ll be heading over to peruse TANK’s collection of cute cigarette books (pocket-sized versions of classics by the likes of Kafka and Tolstoy), carpets (?!), and just generally buying all of our Christmas presents. More info here.
Parting shot
Ex-gallerina turned every-gallerina’s-fave-pop-novelist (Ottessa Moshfegh) has been rather inventive with her Depop offerings in recent months, as exposed on Twitter. We’re asking you all to stay brave and strong in the face of the mark-ups she must be making on these things.