Futurism escapism

Part of the group show Emergency, Aspex, Portsmouth, 2021

Emergency is Aspex’s biennial group exhibition of emerging artists, selected from an international open call of over 300 submissions. The ninth edition gathered eight artists working across sculpture, photography and moving image.

The work explores gold and its representations, treating gold as a universal embodiment of the supreme and exposing the preciosity of the material to unfold the frictions and asymmetries of the system in which it operates. Made with a sixteenth-century water-based gold leafing technique traditionally used for icons, it draws a parallel between the archaism of the medium and the stratifications underlying contemporary narratives, opening liminal spaces beyond the internal consistency of the dominant paradigm.

futurism escapism belongs to the Familiar Spirits series.
Familiar Spirits brings together a set of imaginary artefacts, charms and talismans worked in real gold leaf and golden lacquer, dedicated to invoking or revoking the presence of familiar spirits. Gold is treated as the universal embodiment of the dominant paradigm: distorted, cracked, diverted from its function as a marker of prestige to carry a different symbolic economy.