Supplement is pleased to present Again, it objects, a group exhibition of four UK-based artists: Ben Cain, Sarah Forrest, Brad Grievson and Sophie Jung. This is the second show in the gallery’s New York space.
The show is rooted in these four artists’ examination of the limits of language and its relationship to objects. Seen together, these works all pose a challenge to our understanding of speech and the world as interlinked, locked in a system of illustration. The narratives we build around the things that surround us become a new grammar of objects and interrelations, building a system that instead of making meaning clear only distances it.
The hesitance in The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful, Sophie Jung’s video, is suffused with a sense of anxiety. The narrative voice tests itself, assesses its impact as it speaks. Description collapses into listlessly scrawled line and language struggles to form an account. The image may feel unstable, an articulation of an erratic logic, but the narrator invites the viewer to follow, a tour guide to its own reason.
What looks like one thing could be another. Brad Grievson’s paintings are a composition of black casement fabric, the kind used in stage sets and theatre productions, on canvas. Using rabbit skin glue, the work is then bound into its surface. It’s a sculptural collage rendered flat by way of its medium. They’re based on houses, in another move to shift what seems stable to be out of place, erased, further taken away from itself. The sense that an object carries a fixed, single meaning or use is easy to manipulate.
In Again, it objects, a new video by Sarah Forrest from which the show takes it title, the focus lingers on a curtain, almost still as a black hole opens in the room. It’s a narrative of uncertainty, of the unexpected coming true. It is set apart by a sense of tumbling pace: it’s all happening so quickly with AC/DC in the background and then it’s done, leaving a viewer questioning what just happened and whether it actually did.
In Ben Cain’s work, objects often stand in for instances of language or utterances. A Twister board in grayscale, made of neoprene, the material wetsuits and laptop cases are made from. It’s gray, which negates any inherent quality of the game and rejects the possibility of play. A similar silence is present in the banners hanging from the ceiling—the action is over, the labor has happened and exhaustion takes over. Part of a series of photographs, all reminiscent of stage directions for a production, these image are also a reflection on the production of meaning and how the work of the viewer to construct meaning is also a form of labor.
