Lucy Stein @ Spike Island Artspace, Bristol - Wet Room

Lucy Stein: Wet Room

Spike Island Artspace, Bristol

Through 16 January 2022

LUCY STEIN 

Jung in PZ (2020)

Acrylic, oil, charcoal, Sennelier pastel

and oil stick on canvas, 240 x 180cm  

Courtesy the artist and Gregor Staiger, Zurich 

Photograph by Steve Tanner

Spike Island presents Wet Room, the first major solo exhibition in the UK by Cornwall-based artist LUCY STEIN (b. 1979). Working primarily with painting and drawing, Lucy Stein’s show is inspired by the fougou: narrow Neolithic underground passages unique to West Cornwall that lead to womb-like chambers and have become sacred sites of worship. Echoing the ritual rebirthing ceremonies that are believed to have taken place within these uterine caverns, the exhibition centres around an installation comprising a bathtub and sink with running taps, surrounded by tiled walls that have been hand-painted with scenes relating to the artist’s study of western esoteric traditions.

Informed by Lucy Stein’s long-standing research into the goddess culture that thrives in Land’s End, this installation transports audiences to the mythical Celtic land of Lyonesse: the legendary sunken kingdom off the Cornish peninsula. The mermaids and water creatures painted onto the tiled walls represent the archetypes of the Anima – the driving forces of the human psyche traditionally associated with femininity, and described variously as irrational, emotional and nurturing. Characterised by a soft and alluring palette of red, pink and blue-green hues, the eerie, fairy tale-like qualities of these underwater scenes portray the psychological state of an overactive Anima.

Surrounding the central installation is a series of new paintings and drawings. Made during Stein’s second pregnancy and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, these new works reflect on a period of intensive domestic caregiving and anxiety. They combine Greek mythology, esoteric culture, and ecclesiastical and medieval imagery with vibrant tableaus that depict a wide range of western female archetypes. We see Mary Magdalene (2021) mournfully kissing the wounds of a dead Christ; an exuberant young woman with exaggerated breasts holding an ear of corn in May Queen (2020); and a tussling, half-naked old woman in Hag Fight (2020). Through these works Stein brings in the notion of the numinous – a religious or spiritual quality – in an attempt to describe the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.

In 2020, Lucy Stein began to study psychoanalysis, and many of the works in the exhibition reflect on psychoanalytical processes such as transference or projection – when someone redirects their feelings or desires towards one person to another. Splitting and Projection (2020) embodies and illustrates these processes: the artist applies wax to unpainted linen to resist the oil paint, building up a multiplicity of images that complicate the reading of the work. Here, a skeleton split in two is suspended against a vigorously painted red background and surrounded by ghostly traces of other figures and faint iconography.

Populated by romantic allusions and unexpected juxtapositions, the works in Wet Room share a raw quality, where quick, expressive brushstrokes and areas of intensive reworking reveal Stein’s changing moods and compulsive approach to making. Loaded with wittiness and humour, they challenge the different clichés and stereotypes that have shaped the interpretations of esoteric culture and the female psyche for decades.

Lucy Stein: Wet Room is commissioned and produced by Spike Island, Bristol. The exhibition tours to De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, from 29 January to 2 May 2022. Wet Room is part of the West of England Visual Arts Alliance programme, supported by Arts Council England.

LUCY STEIN (b. 1979) is based in St Just, Cornwall. She studied at The Glasgow School of Art, and later at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Thesmophoria (including the performance lecture Bride of Quiet), Galerie Gregor Staiger, Milan (2020); Digitalis Purpurea (a re-introspective), Conceptual Fine Arts, Milan (online) (2020); £10.66, Palette Terre, Paris (2018); Crying the Neck, NICC Brussels (with Nina Royle) (2017); On Celticity (organised with Paola Clerico), Rodeo Gallery, London (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Futura, Prague (2020); Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2019); Tate St Ives (2018); TULCA festival, Galway; Newlyn Gallery, Penzance (all 2017); Le Bourgeoise, London (2016); UKS Oslo (2015). In 2017 she co-organised Fuck you wheres my Suger, a two-day festival on themes of depression and hysteria at Cafe Oto in London with Mark  Harwood. In 2016 she co-curated NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH! at Evelyn Yard, London with France-Lise McGurn and in 2015 she organised the performance event The Wise Wound with Tate St Ives and Porthmeor Studios. Between November 2019 and May 2022, Lucy Stein and Sarah Hartnett are undertaking a pilgrimage along the Mary ley line, which runs from Carn Les Boel in Cornwall to Hopton in Norfolk.

SPIKE ISLAND

133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6UX

www.spikeisland.org.uk

Peggy Ahwesh @ Spike Island, Bristol - Vision Machines

Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines 

Spike Island, Bristol 

25 September 2021 - 16 January 2022 

PEGGY AHWESH

She Puppet (2001)

Digital video with sound, 15 mins. 

Courtesy the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York

Vision Machines is the first survey exhibition in the UK by American artist PEGGY AHWESH (b. 1954, Pennsylvania, USA). Curated in collaboration with London-based scholar Erika Balsom, the exhibition includes single-channel films and video installations made between 1993 and 2021.

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. Whether by working with nonprofessional performers, especially children, or by repurposing existing images – such as a decaying pornographic film, the video game Tomb Raider, or computer-animated news coverage – Peggy Ahwesh embraces improvisatory strategies that probe the critical potential of play. With keen attentiveness to the materiality of bodies and media technologies alike, her works articulate a feminist commitment to the marginal and the minor.

Even as Peggy Ahwesh rejects the notion of style as authorial signature, her concerns with sexuality, subjectivity, and troubling the boundary between the animate and inanimate have remained constant across the decades. Focusing on a selection of works that explore the relationship between the body and the technologized image, the exhibition at Spike Island spans issues and ideas as diverse as gender, climate change and war.

A new paperback reader – the first monographic publication on Peggy Ahwesh’s work to date – accompanies the show. Presenting an overview of the artist’s practice from the 1980s to the present day, the book is designed by Mike Gallagher and features newly commissioned essays by film scholars Erika Balsom and Elena Gorfinkel, writer Tendai Mutambu, novelist Shola von Reinhold, and an interview between Peggy Ahwesh and academic John David Rhodes.

PEGGY AHWESH

Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. Born in 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, she received her B.F.A. at Antioch College, Ohio. Retrospective exhibitions include: Girls Beware!, Whitney Museum of American Art (1997); Filmmuseum, Brussels; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Peggy’s Playhouse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; others. Screenings: Whitney Biennial (1991, 1995, 2002); New York Film Festival (1998, 2007); Flaherty Film Seminar (2003); Pompidou Center (2002, 2004); Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2017). Festivals include: Berlin; London; Cairo; Toronto; Rotterdam; and Creteil, France. Certain Women (codirected with Bobby Abate) was an official selection at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the opening night film at the New York Underground Film Festival (2004). Other films include Martina’s Playhouse, The Deadman (codirected with Keith Sanborn), Strange Weather, and Nocturne, all in Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. She has received grants from Jerome and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, Alpert Award in the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters. She teaches Film and Electronic Art at Bard College, New York.

ERIKA BALSOM

Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea and the co-editor of the anthology Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 (2019). She is also the author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017) and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), and the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016). In 2017, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Sight and Sound, and in 2017 was the international curator in residence at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Zealand. In 2019, together with the artist Eric Baudelaire, she was awarded an UNDO fellowship from Union Docs. She is currently writing a short book about James Benning’s film TEN SKIES.

SPIKE ISLAND

133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6UX

www.spikeisland.org.uk

Veronica Ryan @ Spike Island, Bristol - Along a Spectrum

Veronica Ryan: Along a Spectrum 

Spike Island, Bristol 

19 May - 5 September 2021 

VERONICA RYAN 

Pouch, 2020 

Net, orange peels, black thread 

Photograph by Max McClure

© Veronica Ryan.

Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 

and Alison Jacques, London

Spike Island presents a major exhibition of new works by British artist VERONICA RYAN (b. 1956, Montserrat). This is Veronica Ryan's largest and most ambitious exhibition in the UK to date.

Veronica Ryan came to prominence in the 1980s with a number of prestigious exhibitions at venues such as Riverside Studios, London (1988) and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1989). Best known tor her sculpture that is evocative of shapes, forms and objects from the natural world, Veronica Ryan's work defies easy categorisation. Over the years, she has experimented with scale, material and technique while remaining focused on the interplay between conflicting opposites: revelation and concealment, container and contained, absence and presence. Her work sits at the intersection between materiality and idea, and enquires into the processes by which objects carry and construct meaning.

Made during an extended residency at Spike Island in Bristol, the works in Along a Spectrum examine environmental and socio-political concerns, personal narratives, history and displacement, as well as the wider psychological implications of the current pandemic. Cast forms in clay and bronze lie directly on the gallery floor; sewn and tea-stained fabrics hang loosely from the walls; and bright neon crocheted fishing line pouches filled with a variety of seeds, fruit stones and skins stretch down from the walls and ceiling to the floor. Arrangements of handmade objects lie alongside assortments of fruits and seeds on metal shelving units; contrasting elements that when brought together acquire a symbolic and

emotional dimension.

A number of clay works cast from medical foam pillows deepen Veronica Ryan's investigation into ideas of recovery, rescue and restoration. Devoid of the nurturing qualities that provide comfort to the aching body, these uncannily shaped pillows are placed on the floor or stacked to their tipping point in precarious arrangements. Throughout the exhibition Veronica Ryan alludes to earlier works in her processes of making, such as the accumulation and stacking of various food containers, resonating with some of her most emblematic works of the 1990s that were lost in the 2004 fire at the Momart warehouse in east London.

In other works, cocoa pods, soursop and orange skins, drift seeds, mango and avocado stones are cast in clay and bronze or simply left to dry. Fruits, seeds, plants and vegetables are recuring motifs in Veronica Ryan's sculpture. They show a concern whith where and how plants germinate, what conditions enable them to take root across different environments and how they travel from one location to another. They function metaphorically for Veronica Ryan's own sense of dislocation, and more widely they allude to a history of Montserrat or Alliouagana - as it was know prior to the arrival of the Europeans - and on trying to identify its early culture. As such, a group of soursop skins has been cast in clay and glazed with volcanic ash from Alliouagana.

Elusive and beguiling, the works in Along a Spectrum consider the attachments that we form with the materials and objects around us; hinting at the connections we make between the landscapes of our interior and the exterior worlds.

A new publication accompanies the exhibition, presenting an overview of Veronica Ryan's practice from the 1980s to the present day. Designed by Daly & Lyon, it features rarely seen images, a detailled biographical timeline, an interview with Courtney J. Martin and newly commissioned essays by Vanessa Boni, Dorothy Price and Natalie Rudd.

This exhibition is supported by Freelands Foundation through the annual Freelands Award.

SPIKE ISLAND

133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6UX

www.spikeisland.org.uk