Andromedan Sad Girl is the first major collaborative exhibition by artists Florence Peake and Tai Shani. Through ambitious new sculptural works and wall paintings, the artists will create an immersive and imaginary site of a lost pre-symbolic civilization.
Florence Peake and Tai Shani
In creating these new works, Peake and Shani are interested in exploiting the fluidity and speculation of lost civilizations and their mythologies. They will take an archaeological excavation as a point of departure to imagine and represent a non-hierarchal pre-historical civilization.
The installation, which will transform Wysing’s gallery in its entirety, will privilege sensation; sculptures will be formed of voluptuous fabrics and will incorporate flocking techniques to create soft and sensuous objects that can be touched. Using multilayered elements, including sound, the exhibition will transport the visitor to an entirely coherent alternative reality.
As the artists tell us:
Deep times, in dark ages, much time ago, beyond the burning witch, silicone and engine, settlement and temple, beyond ape, beyond synthetic ape or flesh or smooth fin or scale or feather, before cell after networked cell and spangle of mica, then mica, then stardust in the lightheaded shock totality of a bloody dimension ruthlessly cut into the bleeding real, to where it grew sticky and sweet like you, past the slick and palpitating glaze, before echo echoes, where breathless together, we phosphoresce. There, where the black of end-times and the pure lux of in the beginning gently touch in an immutable, eternal hologramic kiss.
I have lived a good, good life, we declare in our beautiful telepathic hive mind and we too kiss partly formed and spectral crystalline, nipples rock hard and dripping wet with peaked sentience in our girlhood beds. We are unformed, a relic of synchronised plume. An incalculable vertiginous skin, a vast responsive surface that extends beyond the horizon of our world, here we seeped choral frequencies; Boooooooooooo moooooeeeeeoooooo neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee aaaaaeeeeeeeoooo (approximate).
Preview: Saturday 7 October 2017, 6-8pm Exhibition: 8 October – 19 November 2017 Live performance event: 4 November Wysing Arts Centre www.wysingartscentre.org
Florence Peake was an artist in residence at Wysing in 2016 and Tai Shani will be in residence at Wysing in the summer of 2017. This two-person exhibition Andromedan Sad Girl with Florence Peake and Tai Shani is situated in Wysing’s wider artistic programme for 2017, Wysing Polyphonic during which Wysing are exploring ‘many voices’.
About The Artists
Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. As a trained dancer Florence Peake’s background in choreography and painting stimulates a studio practice that is both diverse and immersive. Peake is often working performatively to incorporate drawing, painting and sculptural materials. Florence Peake’s work has been shown nationally and internationally; she is a recipient of the Jerwood Choreographic Research project, 2016.Her solo performance piece, Voicings, has toured to Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, 2017; the Serpentine Gallery, Mysterical day, 2016; Somerset House for Block Universe performance festival, 2016. Solo exhibitions include: WE perform I am in love with my body Bosse and Baum Gallery 2017, The Keeners Solo show at SPACE 2015; Hall of the swell, Gallery Lejeune, 2015; The BALTIC, Newcastle ensemble piece MAKE. Group exhibitions include: Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden, curated by Marcelle Joseph 2017, Hayward Gallery, a 3 month performance installation as part of Mirrorcity, 2015; National Portrait Gallery, performing group work Paper Portraits, 2015. She has done commissions from: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Modern Art, Oxford; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; Harris Museum, Preston; David Roberts Art Foundation, London.
Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. Shani’s on-going project Dark Continent Productions that proposes an allegorical city of women is an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies within which Christine builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. This non-hierarchical approach also determines the construction of the characters and narrative of Dark Continent. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, recent exhibitions and commissions include, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); ICA, London (2011)
Commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre and supported using public funding by Arts Council England, with additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation and The Elephant Trust.
