Dirty Laundry
Group show:
We are a collective of 8 MA Painting Students from UAL, Camberwell collage of art, showcasing together as part of our intermit.
Our concept for the show is process and development, with ideas surrounding the fluidity of growth and change. We are excited at the prospect of exhibiting an expanded contemporary notion of painting. This will be demonstrated through our diverse and experimental cohort.
Our practice explores themes surrounding family narrative and histories, feminism and gender, trauma, Anxiety, mythology, play and understanding the human condition.
We explore such themes through an international and British Lence. With artists from: China, Russia, Italy, Greece, Canada, America, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia.
Dirty Laundry Exhibition Space
We are excited to exhibit at this space, having met Fresh Salad at their recent exhibition, Canyon. We enjoyed the community ethos and the galleries desire to promote and support emerging artists. With these notions in mind Ramah and myself wanted to form our collective 'Dirty Laundry'.
This will be the first steppingstone for a lot of us to expand ourselves out of the educational realm and into the London art scene especially for our international fellow artists
Dirty Laundry, photos of the exhibition
Dirty laundry Private View
Drip drip drip drip our guests come in wet from the rain. Tiny puddles forming around each honoured member. Folks squeeze the water out of their hair and immediately head to the elegant black covered bar. Humans, dips and cheeses flavoured sticks with real glass wear for the wine, all the guests drawn to this bar and used up stocks before drifting across the show. Dirty laundry’s private view coincided with the opening of the big wall project. So we had two private views happening at once. Creating an interesting dynamic and flow of people between the both shows. At 7pm the big walk project had speeches and so I was politely asked to turn off my sound pieces. However prior to that, the voices of the women I had interviewed flowed though out the space. As you chattered and discussed the excellent curation of the art works by Rahman and myself your conversations was invalided with snippets of my women’s voices as they speak with open and honestly about sex, friendship, jealousy and work.
Speaking to Geraint during the evening he suggested for our next private view we could also have a panel talk or open conversation event at the space. I think this is a great idea and definitely something Dirty Laundry will explore as an avenue.
Dirty Laundry, photos of private view
Dirty Laundry Reflections on Curtain
Ramah, Xingxin and I planned this exhibition with the help of the student union, after replying to a call out. We were successful out of 150 applications. Unfortunately, this show coincided with the second Bargehouse exhibition. To work around this, we changed the time of the show to be 6-8pm, and offered free drinks.
We wanted the show to be a group show of all women artists. However, we did not want to emphasise the fact that this was a female only show. When going to recent exhibitions, including ‘Women in Modernism’ and the RA and ‘Action, Gesture, Paint Women Artists and Global Abstraction’ at Whitechapel, it has been obvious that these shows have been created with the express notion that it is a group of women exhibiting together.
Although this is pleasing and demonstrates positive change, it feels insulting, and othering. Especially when viewing women in abstraction, when paintings were hung almost on top of each other with no space to breath. Therefore, although our show is a collective of women, we didn’t draw attention to this. Rarham and myself were careful when considering who we wanted to be in our collective, we wanted to work with artists who had similar themes as our own. Although the exhibition isn’t about women, it still represents a female experience: Visual imagery that keep re-occurring included shoes, eyes and implied sex.
Ramah and myself curated and hung the exhibition, deciding to mix up all of the work to create a cohesive group show; instead of having each person showing her work as a collection. We were excited with notions around obsessive collection, feminism, and play.
This was a new style of curation for me, as I would traditionally hang my work all together as my current practise focuses on women in conversation with one another. Following a tutorial with Leo, I realised they are individual pieces and that as a collective they don’t harmonise well, or represent what I’m trying to explore when thinking about conversations with women as a group.
Instead, they represent and demonstrate my conversations with these women, rather than with each other. My paintings are more of an investigation into each woman and my relationship with them: ‘Unlike any other genre, the portrait demands the meeting of two subjectivities: if the artist watches, judges the sitter, the sitter is privileged, by the portrait relation, to watch and judge back’. 1)
When curating the space, we considered a lot about how to hang the work. Should we try a scatter hang? Or perhaps a straight hang with the middle point being 150cm? We took time to evaluate these options but ultimately decided to vary the hang on different walls.
I had concerns that my own work could get lost among some of the larger pieces on display. However, once positioned, my work held its space strongly. I particularly enjoyed the placement of my painting of Orla ‘Sushi, Sex and Sensual Drag’ next to Dasiy’s sculpture ‘red high heels. They scream of femininity and sexuality while also feeling rather edgy and violent with their sharp red points.
Jenna’s work needed an opposite wall to work. This was because the eyes are sharing into a mirror and the sofa is reflected back as the reflection. It was interesting to incorporate her needs for the work, while also keeping the rhythm of the show.
I have now learnt from from my experience at Bargehouse, I used speakers to include soundscapes of interviews with my subjects. I placed one on the side of the show close to my painting Orla and another close to Beth. The speakers played the sound pieces on loop, playing each interviews. By having two speakers in the show, the space feels full of sound, full of these women’s voices. Ambiguity was also created as it is unclear whose interview matches which painting.
1) P283 Women Artists – The Linda Nochlin Reader
