LONDON.- l’étrangère announces SUCKERZ, a presentation of new sculptural works by British artists Emma Hart and Jonathan Baldock in their first exhibition together.
Gaping mouths, tongues, nipples, and arseholes occupy the gallery in an agitated display of bodies, orifices and foodstuffs across a messy and precarious banqueting table. SUCKERZ presents Hart’s and Baldock’s exaggerated forms in a carnivalesque conglomeration within the gallery: a series of protagonists and props that invite the viewer into the artists’ unofficial feast.
A preoccupation with the grotesque and its relationship to the physical body is present in both Hart’s and Baldock’s practices, which often employ ceramics and textiles. The sweaty skivvies from Hart’s installation at Folkestone Triennial (2014) serve the busts of Baldock’s extravagant ‘fools’, whilst they ‘eat’ with napkins wrapped in tongues off of nipple-punctured plates.
In the back gallery we find flows of spaghetti-locks sprouting out of hair scrunchies placed alongside a screen of hand-sewn peepholes. Order and disorder conflate throughout the exhibition with movements in and out of orifices: expulsion and retraction, sucking in and blowing out. The title of the exhibition refers to the flows, passageways and entry-holes that link our inside and outside spaces. The double bind of interior and exterior experience holds the body in a nervous tension whereby an ‘excess moment’ is always possible: a spill here, a spurt there, or an embarrassing remark that betrays the social pleasantries that simultaneously stress and restrain us.
This push and pull that is embedded within the transgressive body is related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of grotesque realism. In Rabelais and His World (1965) it is described not as ‘a closed, completed unit…[but]…it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world’.
Emma Hart (b. 1974, London) lives and works in London and has presented exhibitions and performances in the UK and internationally. These include solo exhibitions: Spread, Art Exchange (2015); Giving It All That, Folkestone Triennial (2014); Dirty Looks, Camden Arts Centre (2013); M20 Death Drives, Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable (2012); TO DO, Matt’s Gallery, London; Outpost, Norwich and CIRCA Projects, Newcastle (2011/12); Word Processor, Stanley Picker Gallery, London (2012); Jam, Cell Project Space, London (2011).
Recent group exhibitions include: Hey I'm Mr.Poetic, Wysing Arts Centre (2014); Bloody English, OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); The World Turned Upside Down, Mead Gallery, Coventry (2013); Night and Day, Modern Art Oxford (2010); Performa '09, New York (with Benedict Drew).
Hart was awarded a Random Acts commission for The Jarman Awards 2013, which was broadcast on Channel Four in 2014. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Jerwood / Film and Video Umbrella Awards: Tomorrow Never Knows, with an exhibition at Jerwood Space, London. Hart was resident at Camden Arts Centre with her Question Department in 2009 and for The Forest residency at Wysing Arts Centre in 2012. She received an MA in Fine Art from the Slade in 2004 and completed her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2013.
Jonathan Baldock (b. 1980, Pembury, UK) graduated from The Royal Collage of Art in 2005. He has exhibited internationally with solo shows including: Notes from the Orifice at VITRINE, Bermondsey Street, London (2014);The Soft Machine, Chapter, Cardiff (2014); Multiple points in this crude landscape, Primary, Nottingham (2014); Warm Bodies (with Olga Balema), Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Netherlands (2014); Hot Spots, The Apartment, Vancouver, Canada (2014); A Strange mix between a Butcher’s Shop and a Nightclub, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2013); The Blue Epoch, Colloredo-‐Mansfeldský Palác, AMoYA, Prague, Czech (2012).
Group shows include: Dance First, Think Later, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, UK (2015); A Friend is Only a Human Body, Nicelle Beauchene, New York, US (2015); Hey, I’m Mr Poetic Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2014); Two Figures in a Landscape (choreographed by Rubato Dance Group), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2013); Relativity Absolute, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2013).
Baldock has received international awards and residencies, including: Abbey Fellowship, British School in Rome, Italy (2013); Residency – The Forest, Wysing Art Centre Cambridge, UK (2012); and Skowhegan, School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Maine, USA (2007).
