EASTBOURNE.- Towner Art Gallery is showcasing a new body of large-scale dynamic sound sculpture, film, wall-based works and a specially commissioned performance by British artist Hannah Perry.
GUSH is a candid and personal exploration of mental and emotional health in our contemporary, hyper-networked society, and is Perry’s first major solo exhibition in the UK outside London, following the launch of GUSH at Somerset House earlier this month.
Central to the exhibition is an immersive 360° film that surrounds viewers with the contorted, continuously shifting movement of bodies. With a soundtrack combining spoken word, an instrumental score written in collaboration with composers Mica Levy and Coby Sey, and the London Contemporary Orchestra, the film reflects on the altered states of the self, including the impact trauma and grief can have on our physical and mental states. In an intensely personal yet universal exploration of the experience of romance, psychosis and loss, the installation marks the first time Perry has chosen to address the tragic recent suicide of her best friend and collaborator.
Other works in the exhibition extend Perry’s interest in car modification, including a pulsating large-scale audio sculpture – which is reimagined to occupy Towner’s expansive gallery spaces - incorporating stretched car body wrap and subwoofer speakers, enabling sound frequencies to create distorted patterns upon the mirrored surface of the sculpture, altering the viewer’s reflected self and surroundings.
Further new works include an hydraulic sculpture that suggests moments of violence, tenderness and intimacy through mechanised interaction, sometimes synchronising, and at other moments crashing together, while in new wall-based pieces, Perry combines her distinctive silk screen printing technique with digital photographs, car lacquer and painting.
On Saturday 10 November, for the launch of the exhibition, Towner presents a newly commissioned performance, devised and choreographed by Hannah Perry. Working with London Contemporary Orchestra and music producer Coby Sey, four dancers explore the body’s endurance capabilities, struggles, rhythms and repetitions.
Hannah Perry: GUSH is conceived by Somerset House Trust, in partnership with Towner Art Gallery.
Hannah Perry is a British artist and Somerset House Studios resident working mainly in installation, sculpture, print and video. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, Perry uses a network of personal references to continuously generate and manipulate videos, sounds, images and objects, exploring intimate memory in a hyper-technological society. Guided by music, deceleration and repetition, Perry reveals youth and femininity as defined through images as well as beholder of desires.
Recent exhibitions include: Rage Fluids, Kunstlerhaus, Halle fur Kunst & Medien, Austria (2018); Viruses Worth Spreading, Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2017); 100 Problems at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2016); I feel we think bad at Arsenal Montreal, Canada (2016); Mercury Retrograde, Seventeen, London (2015); You’re gonna be great at Jeanine Hofland, Amsterdam (2015); Private settings: art after the Internet at MOMA, Warsaw, Poland (2014); Stedelijk at Trouw at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013); and Hannah Perry at Zabludowicz Collection (2012).
