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[20210323]
ETERNITY ANYWAYS by GABRIELE BEVERIDGE at CHEWDAY’S [from 20160518 to 20160709]
[Photos: CHEWDAY’S]
Hanging in the window, Grace and Mercy, 2016 takes its name from a previous inhabitant of the gallery premises – a fashion retailer whose signage still remains ghostly visible above. An arrangement of found images and objects, the work depicts two near-identical portraits of a woman - advertisements found by Beveridge in separate shop windows. Cropped from their branding and framed side-by-side these high production, commercial images – once finely tuned for mass appeal and geographical reach – are sapped of their intended power and rendered elusive.
Clouds I, II, and III are three large scale works made up of shop fitting panels – some powder-coated in pristine pastel tones, others grubby and dilapidated in the discarded state that they were found in. Arranged into grids they evoke the sublime abstract paintings of Agnes Martin or the monuments of an unidentified civilization. On the inside of the gallery window cling chrome garment rails amplified in their abundance to the point of extraterrestrial absurdity. Hand-blown glass bubbles punctuate the exhibition. Slumped over the works, they reflect and distort the rigid metal retail structures that underpin them.
Through strategies of selection, framing and recombination Beveridge reconfigures the hierarchies of commercial images and objects. Her diverse assemblages seek to examine the relationship between theshared access that everyone might have to the visual languages that saturate our contemporary existence and the special access that each of us has to personal memory and private experience. Less interested in a prescriptive rhetoric on consumer culture than exploring how the poetic and the personal can be addressed under contemporary conditions, Beveridge sits on the line between ambivalence and celebration – investigating a fascination between the lure of consumer images and objects and the values that they preserve and perpetuate.
[Text: CHEWDAY’S]
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