ALL NIGHT at Sherbet Green dance music, sexuality and industrial waste. The mechanisms of information distribution continue to warp and accelerate. Newby, Hawser, Hope, and Galyas look to draw connections between cultural artefacts in relation to this immutable change. Pornography, rave fliers, and newspapers are stacked, smothered, and soaked. Taken out of circulation, the uncertain and unstable surfaces of these works solidify the ephemeral nature of the printed image. Such production confronts the very meaning and direction of the source material. Often distributed and discarded en masse, their lustre fading as night turns to day, these images meet their disfigurement and ultimate demise in the liminal spaces of the city.
About the works:
Louis Blue Newby Through the processes of scanning, cropping, reprinting and rearranging various images and text taken from a personal archive of queer printed material and pornography, Newby’s work posits a language that leans into its own subjectivity and centres itself around the oppositional mode of queerness. These collages attempt to inhabit queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that archives are in fact fictions, narratives that seek to organise and regulate the desires of the peripheral. Layering, both physical and symbolic, is key within this practice, performed through digital image manipulation and analogue techniques, transforming the plane of the work into a site of relation and interconnection. Crisco, a brand of vegetable cooking fat that is also historically used as a lubricant within fisting subcultures, is an important material in this process. When applied to archival tissue paper and newsprint, it eases open the page, as if the body, exposing the images that lie beneath the surface.
Eloise Hawser In these works, Hawser reconfigures and repurposes discarded printing plates and newspapers into sculptural and 2D forms, exploring their narrative, psychological and affective potential. Through this practice, she considers the decay cycle of news media; no more pronounced than in the printing of newspapers, which is a process that generates huge amounts of metal, paper and chemical waste. The works form part of the wider PressTracker Project Archive (2019–ongoing), which also encompasses an online website that brings together gov.uk stats and front page news, originally initiated in order to map the progress of the pandemic against daily front page news stories from UK titles.
Mimi Hope & Ben Galyas As a duo, Hope & Galyas have a long standing interest in the history of UK dance culture, its physical manifestations and experiential reality. For Serious Dance Lovers Up & Down the Country, Respect You! 2×2 is a series of re-photographic prints spanning solarised c-type experiments, screen(mis)prints, and contoured solar etchings. The works originate from a flyer for “The Awakening”, a 1991 party that took place in Peterborough promising “NON STOP DANCE MANIA”. Their interest in the flyer stems from both its form and composition; a sublime natural paradise. The metaphorical implications of the communal spiritual ecstasy promised by early dance parties and its unravelling into their reality. The work itself addresses the mass distribution of the original source. Hope & Galyas have allowed the natural mishappens of traditional print processes to alter and occasionally destroy the image. Their intention throughout is to create difficult pictures, to delay legibility and countenance immediate gratification.
ALL NIGHT, Louis Blue Newby, Eloise Hawser, and Mimi Hope & Ben Galyas, Sherbet Green, PV: Thursday 10th November, 6 – 9pm 11th November – 9th December 2022
About the artists
Louis Blue Newby (b. 1996) graduated from his BA at Chelsea College of Arts in 2018 and recently completed the MA programme at the Slade School of Fine Art. Exhibitions include: Sessions Arts Club (forthcoming; November 2022), The Artist Room at the Tom Of Finland Foundation Arts & Culture Festival (2022); SKINFLICKS, Xxijra Hii (2022); MELTDOWN, Ridley Road Project Space (2022); JUDD, Barbican Arts Group Trust (2022); healthy pink, springseason (2020). In 2019, Newby was selected as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Other awards include, the OMNI Artist Award (2021) and the The This is This Award (2018). Newby’s moving-image work South Florida Sky, a collaboration with artist Laila Majid, was selected as part of the Dazed X Circa Class of 2022.
Eloise Hawser (b. 1985) is a conceptual sculptor and mixed media artist, living and working in London. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. Her installation The Tipping Hall was presented at the Istanbul Biennial in 2019, before being exhibited at the Montpellier Contemporain in 2020. Her first UK solo institutional exhibition, Lives on Wire, was presented by the ICA in 2015, with a major exhibition at Somerset House, by the deep, by the mark, shown three years later. Other shows include History of Nothing (White Cube, 2016), Weight of Data (Tate Britain, 2015), and Surround Audience (New Museum, New York, 2015). Her works can be found in several institutional collections, such as Tate Britain and Vienna’s MUMOK.
Mimi Hope (b. 1994) lives and works in London. Exhibitions include: Victoria Miro, London (2022); South Parade, London (2022); Alex Vardaxoglou, London (2021); Koenig Galerie, Berlin (2020); Sarabande Foundation & Burberry, London (2020); Palazzo Monti, Italy (2019); Supplement, London (2018). In 2020, Hope graduated with the Class of 2020 at Mountain School of Arts, LA. Residencies and awards include Cubitt Artists, where she is a current resident; Palazzo Monti, Italy (2019); the Sarabande Foundation, London (2018). In 2018, Hope was selected as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries.
