Nina Hartmann: Experience Machine
Opening 26 April
Glasshouse is delighted to announce Nina Hartmann’s solo exhibition Experience Machine, opening on Friday 26 April. The New York-based artist uses her practice to excavate arcane historical events and narratives, including conspiracy theories, covert programs of psychological and paranormal investigation by the US military and the historic ties between Ivy League universities and the development of controversial military science. As she delves into government databases and obscure corners of the internet where these knowledge systems continue to take on new life, Hartmann deconstructs and reappropriates iconographic strategies used within opaque networks of dissemination and influence. Executed using encaustic, vinyl and resin, her sculptural works diagram clandestine histories and peripheral belief structures, icons of the collapse of the relationship between image and proof.
Each of the paintings that make up SSD presents a variation on the seven-segment display, executed in gouache, vinyl and acrylic on raw canvas. Patented in the early 20th century, the seven-segment display - a modular system of linear components that combine to generate digits - became widely used in the 1970s, tied to the increase in availability of cheap LED devices.
Francesco João: SSD
14 March - 20 April 2024
For João, the ‘SSD’ acts as a visual shorthand for an idea of the future as dreamt from the past, repeatedly rendered in tightly controlled layers of colour. Through their reiteration, the numerals become a formal constraint; a structure used by João to engage the cycles of value and obsolescence embedded in histories of painting.
João’s numbers appear to be embossed: ghostly, mechanical, they belie the painstaking handwork that produced them. Throughout his SSD works, João deftly negotiates between a delicate restraint and an indulgence in the joyful immediacy of his material, as traces of process are made visible through the light speckling of pigment on the painting surfaces and at the edges of each canvas, where layers of gouache are free to bleed and merge.
While the values of the digits and the colours of the ground vary across each work, the composition remains constant; viewed sequentially, the relationship of the display to timekeeping is both emphasised and disrupted as numerals appear to hazily blink on and off at random. The digits become abstractions, rather than representations of value.
In discussion of Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara’s infamous date paintings, curator and art historian Anne Rorimer remarks that ‘if, on one level, a date is mute as an image, on another level it stands for the infinite number of events - from the most personal to the most universal - that “take place” on specific dates.’ It is left to the viewer which function - symbolic or purely visual - takes precedence in their experience of Kawara’s dates and, perhaps, João’s numerals. The SSD series employs the repetition and controlled variation of the numeral as a formalist motif just as readily as it proffers an opportunity for the viewer’s own projection of narrative meditation.
Jame St Findlay: Life Span
02 February - 09 March 2024
Jame St Findlay (b.1994, Scotland) uses the buoy as a sculptural refrain in the series of glazed earthenware vessels at the heart of Life Span. For the artist, the shape is almost incidental, though it contributes to the tendency of the works to speak of foreshores and things set adrift, abraded by silt and brackish water. Their suspension over makeshift pools filled with river water gives form to the primordial impulse to wish into wells; viewed in series, they remind us that the practical functioning of buoys can be talismanic - like magic charms, they signal, protect and preserve.
The surfaces of the sculptures are encrusted with decals and etched marks that melt together to become the detritus of a psychic landscape. Images drawn from stock photography, branding and other pieces of media glimpsed in transit heap and drift beneath bubbling glaze: Joni Mitchell song lyrics appear alongside BT’s old ‘piper’ logo, while lines of scrawled text are crossed out, re-written, trailing off into obscurity.
Moments of familiarity indulge our instinctive urge to decipher, to make a string of symbols into meaning where there is no singular thread to be found. Rather than offering any coherent narrative, the vessels act as carriers, picking up the ambient after-images of a mind in motion and preserving them. Like a Bellarmine jug or a witch-bottle, we can imagine these being dredged up by the mudlarkers of the future - miraculously whole - and examined as the mysterious remnants of defunct belief systems.
A tone of indeterminate longing shifts in and out of focus throughout the installation: a text bubble reads ‘ask me what I’m doing with my life,’ alongside the words ‘together forever’; images show couples kissing and fighting, alongside a solitary figure, hunched with a drooping head. These images are stock photographs, transformed by St Findlay from corporatised iconography of love and romance into ghostly silhouettes evocative of eighteenth century shadow portraits. Archetypes of the heterosexual imaginary reappear throughout Life Span: men with briefcases, women with babies, couples facing each other in opposition and encircled by love-hearts.
Based in London, Jame St Findlay works across sculpture, film, performance and photography. St Findlay is currently completing their final year at Royal Academy Schools; their moving image work Death Knell (2022) is being shown at Camden Arts Centre as part of the 2023 Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Solo exhibitions of their work include Lone, 2023 at Luca’s Gallery, London; Conditional Love, 2022 at Middlesex Presents, London and Low Hanging Fruit, 2022 at Celine Gallery, Glasgow.
Linnea Skoglösa: HYPER FLESH
21 September - 11 November 2023
Linnea Skoglösa’s installation HYPER FLESH at GLASSHOUSE elaborates upon the artist’s investigations into the compulsive pursuit of self-optimisation that lies at the core of technology-driven consumer culture. Skoglösa uses her distinctive visual language to explore the psychic effects of ‘hyper-wellness’, a sprawling set of practices that broadly share an algorithmic approach to physical and mental transformation. Within this trend towards militant self-regulation, ranging from pseudo-medical skincare regimens to a rigid ‘journalling’ schedule of forensically itemised goals and mantras, Skoglösa has identified a paranoid desire to escape the body and its inevitable fallibility; to become, instead, HYPER FLESH.
Using deconstructed fitness equipment, mechanical hardware, and components extracted from cars and furniture, Skoglösa creates sculptures that resemble exoskeletons, conjuring bodies locked into dopamine-driven feedback loops of physiological self-improvement. Through matte-black surfaces, levers, hints of ergonomic seating and taut elastic bands, Skoglösa co-opts the visual shorthand for streamlined functionality found in consumer products ranging from face massagers to Peloton bikes and Tesla interiors. The modular, reducible nature of the sculptures contrasts with Skoglösa’s paintings, which appear to emanate the sleek, viscous blackness of a dormant mobile phone. This impression of plasticine smoothness is belied by the erratic marks splattered and scratched across their surfaces, a materialisation of the frenetic anxiety that often thrums beneath our screens.
Aurel Schmidt: Trash Dolls
14 - 29 July 2023
GLASSHOUSE presents Trash Dolls, a solo exhibition of recent drawings by New York based artist Aurel Schmidt (b. 1982, Canada), on display until Saturday 29 July.
The works that make up Trash Dolls are the latest in an ongoing series of the same name: since 2019, Schmidt has been transforming the detritus of her environment into characters that embody the psychosomatic effects of a fast-paced life in the big city. The Trash Dolls are formed out of an urban vernacular, the rot and refuse found lining the gutters of New York's streets or littering an apartment in the aftermath of a late night: disposable vapes, rolled up banknotes; cigarette butts and sweet wrappers; an airplane bottle of rum.
Each of Schmidt’s Trash Dolls combines refined, almost hyper-realistic coloured pencil representations with collaged elements of the ‘real thing’: crumpled bottle-caps, baggies, cigarette ash and blood spatters become indivisible from delicately rendered pencil drawings. The figures are composites of objects and goods emptied of value, husks of single-use instant gratification or perhaps compulsive addiction. Half-eaten sushi, battered Swarovski crystals and champagne corks mingle with discarded laughing-gas canisters, rusting razor blades and a range of pills and powders; these could be seen as the remnants of a life lived through commodity fetishism and dependency or the indicators of a night well spent.
Schmidt caricatures this distinctly urban cycle of consumption and waste with affection; the carnivalesque parade of living trash is underscored by a sense of personal intimacy. Every work is endowed with its own crop of human hair, ascribing a bodily specificity to each character. Emanating from friends, lovers, acquaintances and the artist herself, the hair - alongside droplets of blood, coffee stains and spattered beer - materialises intimate relationships in all their messiness and abject physicality. With tongue in cheek, Schmidt catalogues and reconstitutes the sediment of downtown parties and alley way trash heaps, injecting the surrealist wit of Arcimboldo with hedonism and sleaze.
Athen & Nina: Sleepover
22 June - 11 July 2023
Gathering is delighted to announce GLASSHOUSE, a new strand of programming inaugurated by Athen & Nina: Sleepover, running from 22 June - 11 July 2023.
Athen & Nina: Sleepover introduces the collaborative practice of Nina Mhach Durban and Athen Kardashian, two emerging British-Asian artists based in London. Their work, built out of a shared, lifelong preoccupation with the accumulation of objects and images, invites the viewer to witness an intimate dialogue between the two artists and their archives. Using the intuitive actions of assemblage and layering, the duo think through their intersecting personal histories as Londoners raised by first and second-generation Indian mothers, combining an examination of diasporic aesthetics with the secrecy and fervour of a teenager’s bedroom.
The ubiquitous architecture of domestic daily routines provides the ground for most of the works in Sleepover. Noticeboards, shelving, DVD racks and keyrings evoke the trajectory between home and school, while configurations of nail varnish bottles, stickers, postcards and scribbled notes present an intensified abstraction of the adolescent desire to construct worlds within bedrooms.
As in any domestic space, the objects and images arranged here map out layered networks of relationships between people and places. Materials have been donated from grandparents’ homes, gifted by housemates, lifted from the pavement, bought from Ilford Lane in East London and sticker wholesalers in Jaipur; through finding and keeping these objects, they become precious. This drive to collect, retain and display is something both Mhach Durban and Kardashian trace back to their respective maternal grandmothers, who would similarly use their carefully curated collections of photographs and trinkets to decorate every household surface. Many of the magnets, badges, notes and bindis used in the exhibition have come directly from the homes of Brady and Mhach Durban’s grandparents; in placing them alongside items from the two artist’s own collections, the duo stage a conversation implicating multiple generations and geographies.
Presiding over these constructions are glamour shots of Bollywood stars, including Rekha, Amrita Arora, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kajol and Rani Mukerjee. Rekha’s eyes in particular appear again and again, closely cropped and accentuated in the artworks Musical Notes, 2023, Pink Ladies, 2023, and Prem, 2023. Their persistent, multiplied stare challenges the viewer to bisect the web of gazes that suffuses the gallery and in doing so attempt to participate in the silent exchange that seems to be taking place between these otherwordly figures. The images are marked by the traces of touch and translation - fading, crumpling, discolouration - and embellished with inscriptions and childhood charms. As a result of these interventions, the images take on the status of devotional icons, materialising the desire and aspiration that these figures command as ciphers of ideal femininity within South Asia and the Indian diaspora. Placed alongside the pair’s various relics of pre-pubescent crushes - a sticker of High School Musical’s Troy Bolton, a postcard featuring the glistening abs of Aaron Taylor-Johnson - the actresses become one part of a sprawling fan culture landscape, deconstructed and restaged within the gallery space.
In Athen & Nina: Sleepover, Nina Mhach Durban and Athen Kardashian employ nostalgia as an active force. Using a distinctive visual vocabulary accrued through the artists’ own experiences and familial relationships, the duo’s work presents a negotiation between collective and private memory within the context of the migrant archive.