TAI SHANI
ODA ISELIN SØNDERLAND
4 OCT - 9 NOV
OPENING: 4 OCT, 6 - 8 PM
Glasshouse presents an intimate two-person show Haloscope, which takes the points of connection between the practices of Tai Shani (b. 1976) and Oda Iselin Sønderland (b. 1996).
Despite emanating from differing contexts, each of their respective practices appear rooted in a desire to visualise or commune with preternatural worlds in which ecology, myth and technology collide, producing works that function as portals into each artist’s own idiosyncratic cosmology.
The two-person show Haloscope takes the points of connection between the practices of Tai Shani (b. 1976) and Oda Iselin Sønderland (b. 1996). Despite emanating from differing contexts, each of their respective practices appear rooted in a desire to visualise or commune with preternatural worlds in which ecology, myth and technology collide, producing works that function as portals into each artist’s own idiosyncratic cosmology. Both Shani and Sønderland combine a diagrammatic visual schema with a psychedelic sensibility to represent the unrepresentable, in a manner evocative of alchemical tracts or Theosophical symbolism.
Shani borrows signifiers and vocabulary from a range of occult belief systems and esoterica, merging them with her own historical research and speculative fiction to create a far-reaching personal mythology. Cornices and staircases hang in fragments, suspended from their architectural context, while reoccurring motifs including ribbon-like lines, delicate marbling and spots suggest the indecipherable topography of a fictive landscape. Shani’s paintings function similarly to Medieval maps of unknown or imagined geographies: space is mapped on the basis of affect and belief, rather than an immoveable empirical understanding, and the resulting representation reveals more about its author’s metaphysical perspective than objective concepts of location or distance.
In layering washes of translucent watercolour over delicate pencil drawing, Sønderland produces an effect recalling the tracery of butterfly wings, or the jewel-like surface quality of egg-tempera paint, drawing upon the language of video-games as well as fairytales and Nordic folklore to construct microcosmic visions of a world oblique to our own. Just as many of the small, intensively worked panel paintings of the Early Renaissance appear to radiate brightness, Sønderland’s watercolours seem to absorb and reflect light. Executed with filigree precision and a palette of muted pastels, the works are inflected with a lunar strangeness: half-human creatures drift in deserted, crepuscular landscapes, cloaked in a sense of anticipation or foreboding. The oneiric dioramas have a cinematic quality, appearing to capture the moments directly before or after a mythic encounter.
The extraterrestrial imagery employed by Shani and Sønderland functions as portals into complex, self-contained worlds, each with their own symbolic orders, iconography and mythogenesis.
Christian Franzen:
Partial Truth
June 6 - 1 Aug
Glasshouse is delighted to present Partial Truth, a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Christian Franzen (b. 1994). Franzen’s dreamlike paintings depict a quality of light as much as they image the point at which a specific part of the Southern California coastline disintegrates into the Pacific. Each painting refers to a photograph taken by the artist around the area he grew up in, stored in a digital archive. In returning to the same shorelines again and again, Franzen has begun to build what he describes as a ‘unit of place,’ a living document of the shifting moods that animate his particular stretch of sea, sky and land.
These photographs act as starting points, rather than visual guides: in some works, the act of photography is encoded in the canvas as horizon lines, water and the haze of salt hanging in the air are subsumed by flashes of incandescent glare. This dissolution of landscape into atmosphere is evocative of Whistler’s infamous Nocturnes, in which visual phenomena seem to evaporate into abstracted carriers of feeling.
Layered onto the glow of light and water are reflections of objects from Franzen’s studio: gossamer renderings of mementos and found objects, carriers of personal narrative. In earlier paintings, decoy owls - fixtures in the homes of his parents and grandparents - recur; here, they appear draped in fabric, ghostly forms superimposed onto the painted seascapes. The black cat featured in two of the paintings in Partial Truth refers to a childhood game he and other kids would play around their neighbourhood: they would stick two dimes over the eyes of a cardboard cutout of a black cat and place them by the roadside, so that car headlights would reflect off the coins and illuminate them like the dilated pupils of a real cat in the dark. Veiled and translucent, these tokens of Franzen’s personal history act as oblique proxies for the artist’s own presence within the work, gazing out at the sunset from behind glass.
The infusion of the artist’s immediate surroundings into his paintings is felt through the scratches and incisions he makes into the painted surface, using razors, pins and keys found in and around his studio. Each intervention into the smooth gloss of the airbrushed paint creates the effect of a patina or weathering like the crust of salt on windscreens and surfboards, a surface quality that Franzen describes as characteristically Southern Californian. In puncturing the surface of each work, Franzen draws attention to the membrane that separates the pictorial world from our own, foreclosing an immediate immersion into the scene. Instead, he creates a distance between the viewer and the world represented in his paintings, an echo of the gap created between the actuality of a place and a memory of it. Within Partial Truth, sunsets go beyond themselves: like eyes squeezed shut after lying in the sun or a glimpse of sea through a dusty car window, Franzen’s paintings capture the subtle inflection of sense impressions filtered through interiority.
Christian Franzen (b. 1994) is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA from California State University Long Beach in 2018.
He has participated in group exhibitions at In Lieu (Los Angeles), Sow & Tailor (Hong Kong), and James Cohan (New York), among others. Following a solo presentation of work at Frieze London last year with
In Lieu Gallery, this is Franzen’s debut solo exhibition in the UK.
Nina Hartmann: Experience Machine
26 April - 1 June
Would you plug in?
What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
New York-based artist Nina Hartmann uses her practice to excavate arcane historical narratives: covert programs of parapsychological investigation by the US military and related studies within Ivy League universities are at the centre of Experience Machine. As she delves into government databases and corners of the internet where historical fact and conspiracy continue to intertwine, Hartmann deconstructs and reappropriates iconographic strategies employed within opaque networks of dissemination and influence.
Executed using encaustic, vinyl and resin, her paintings and sculptural works diagram clandestine histories and peripheral belief structures to create enigmatic icons of relation. The artist is especially invested in the stranger-than-fiction research that was carried out in the name of prominent institutions, indelibly marking their history while remaining tacitly veiled in opaque archives and databases. Her source material is drawn from caches of public-access information that can be found online, if one knows where to look: she mines the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act Archive alongside message boards and self published websites for imagery to be manipulated into her wall-based sculptures.
Experience Machine takes its name from the thought experiment devised by philosopher Robert Nozick: a brain-in-a-vat style proposition wherein the subject is hooked up to a device that can simulate, with absolute accuracy, a full range of felt pleasures and experiences. All circumstances generated by the machine would be experienced to their fullest scope, with no indication towards their artifice; through this formulation, Nozick seeks to understand the extent to which an incontrovertible notion of reality, extrinsic to our own consciousness of it, ‘matters.’
For Hartmann, the phrase ‘Experience Machine’ resonates on multiple registers. The wording, in its suggestion of the imposition of automation on living, feels appropriate to her overarching interest in the invisible mechanisms that quietly shape our daily lives. More specifically, the pursuit of realising versions of this notional machine seems to haunt much of the alternative research and experimentation that she engages through her work. Being familiar with the speculative ties between MK Ultra’s LSD mind control/truth serum research at Harvard University, Hartmann researched the existence of similar programs conducted at Yale, finding several collections of photographic evidence dealing with the work of Dr. Jose Delgado, a former neuropsychology professor. While at Yale, Delgado conducted tests using an invention he called the ‘stimoceiver’ - a device used to stimulate electrical signals in the brain, reportedly able to elicit motor responses as well as ‘pleasant sensations’ including deep concentration, relaxation and euphoria. The image used in Mind Control Image Connectivity (Maze B), 2024 shows a charging bull Delgado allegedly stopped in its tracks using this device.
Elsewhere, Hartmann employs the 1941 photograph of a man in anachronistically contemporary-looking sunglasses that went viral as ‘proof’ of time travel; another work depicts an anonymous soldier in the act of flinging a box of propagandistic pamphlets from a plane; works 42 / 82 / 214, 2024 and Networked System of Manchurian Candidate Speculations, 2024 refer to conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Stainless steel sculptures Heart Attack Gun (Maze A), 2024 and Mind Control Image Connectivity (Maze B), 2024 are inspired by the moveable mazes that test spatial learning and memory in mice, used in experiments surrounding behavioural modification and fear conditioning.
In their composition, many of Hartmann’s works resemble Lacan’s graphing of the subconscious: images are isolated and set within arrows and annotations that map out immaterial networks of fear, desire and power according to an internal logic just out of the viewer’s reach. Here, the lines, arrows and notations marking out spaces are conceptual, as Hartmann uses the schematic visual shorthand employed in the illustration of relationships within quantifiable data to map the inarticulable. For Gilles Deleuze - who the artist cites as a significant influence - the Diagram functions as an ‘abstract machine’: a ‘map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity’ (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, 1986). In other words, the diagram form has the ability to express abstract forces at play in the organisation of systems. Hartmann’s works can be seen to embody the diagram’s double bind: in their abstraction, they obscure as much as they explicate. Rather than demystifying the glimpses of narrative gleaned from each fragment of found imagery, the artist’s use of schema functions more like the red string on a conspiracy theorist’s wall of ‘evidence.’ Each annotation, graphic, arrow or segmentation feels like the surfacing of a mycelium network of hidden information, challenging the viewer to enter the paranoid state of meaning-making that leads to conspiratorial rationalisation.
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.