DUBLIN.- IMMA presents She bites her tender mind a solo exhibition by legendary multi-disciplinary artist Kim Gordon. With a career spanning more than three decades, Gordon is one of the most prolific and ground-breaking artists working today. Synonymous with the iconic band she co-founded in 1981, Sonic Youth, her work crosses boundaries between visual art, music, fashion, film, writing and performance, and insists on radical experimentation within every field.
She bites her tender mind features a series of new works including recent and previously unseen paintings, drawings, and ceramic sculptures, alongside a glitter installation and an immersive video projection.
The exhibition She bites her tender mind is a poetic response by the artist to the atmosphere and architecture of IMMA’s Courtyard Galleries. For Gordon, this series of four interconnecting rooms, each with its classical detailing, mouldings, mantles and fireplaces, ‘feels like a home of sorts’. A seasoned traveller, Gordon has drawn upon the domestic sensibility of these galleries as an analogy for contemporary urban lodgings, such as Airbnb or Homestay. There can be a certain dislocation and alienation within these faux homes away from home. Gordon wonders about the experience of morphing one’s own reality with these idealised, commercialised lifestyles. At IMMA, she suggests an imagined scenario where the galleries have become her own branded urban lodgings, decorated with lyrical gestures, with one of the new drawings on display taken from Gordon’s Airbnb Series.
The new and recent paintings in the exhibition also contain references to the prolific ancient Greek poet Sappho. Renowned as a symbol of desire and love between women, Sappho’s work continues to influence writers and artists today. The exhibition itself, together with one of the featured new works, takes its title from one of the poet’s word fragments ‘She bites her tender mind’. Several of these paintings see Gordon continuing her research about the body in a feminist reconsideration, where she uses materials such as metallic ink, interference pigments and tracing papers in gestural works. Gordon describes her uniquely visceral approach to creating this exhibition and the effect of her imagined scenario, “I wanted to feel Sappho and make physical manifestations about her in sort of a daydreaming meditation; to make myself into her. Similarly, I try to locate or imagine myself within an Airbnb… Waking up in a strange place to strange art as decoration”.
Alongside these new and recent works, other pieces within the exhibition draw from various series Gordon has produced since 2008. These include the ongoing Noise Painting series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; the From The Boyfriend series that use denim mini-skirts as paint surfaces turned on their sides and presented as minimalist art; and word paintings that refer to ‘hashtag culture’. The word paintings here also serve as a comment on other artworks around them.
An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in previous work, canvases were treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of decomposition and recomposition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence.
