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middlesexpresents · 2 years ago

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Opening Fri 2nd Dec 2022 6–9pm  03.12.2022–11.12.2022, Sat & Sun only, 4–7pm

Conditional Love was Jame St Findlay’s first solo exhibition in London. In Middlesex Presents’ street-facing windows and interior gallery space, it comprised new commissioned photographic works and a film featuring a voiceover performed by Berlin-based artist Bully Fae Collins.

The exhibition was prompted by the acquisition of a doll’s house, which Findlay’s film Conditional Love is shot within. Playing with the doll’s house as a set, or a site, in which someone could live, Findlay started to think about the misery of the generic sad family life that might inhabit this new build home with no doors or corridors. It reminded him of a dream about architectural plans for houses that were so unliveable they seemed to demand your own death.

Empty apart from a wooden bench, we encounter the house in fish-eye shots that linger upon miniature embossed wallpaper, parquet floors and the house’s curved Dutch gable-style facade. These are accompanied by the monologue of a nameless and melancholy father of two, whose discomfort with this identity – ‘I always saw myself as an end point, a full stop’ – is reflected in the inertia of the two-storey building, which, he explains, has no stairs.

The man in the house describes himself as “Saturday’s Child... flesh in the room, a body at a desk”. He is the latest iteration of a recurring motif in Findlay’s work: the ‘nameless heterosexual male’ in APEX PREDATOR (2019), or suited business man appearing across moving image works including Death Knell (2022). This cast of outcasts shelter in dens in wooded landscapes, roam office corridors with green painted faces, prod holes in the snow with a long prosthetic nose.

Whilst Conditional Love (the film) is entirely confined to the doll’s house, large scale photographic blinds drawn shut in the gallery and illuminated in the street-facing windows depict office furniture flickering in and out of focus on a wet and muscular tongue. The voiceover in the film conjures a lonely figure, stunted in, or freed from, the constricting expectations of reproductive masculinity. The blinds suggest a body caught between the grinding status quo and a return to sensuality.

Scottish artist Jame St Findlay combines performance, video, drawing, sculpture, photography and digital collage returning to themes of self, collapse, upending and failure. He is a current student at Royal Academy Schools. Solo and two-person shows include Low Hanging Fruit, Celine Gallery, Glasgow (2022); The Deepest Gurgle I Ever Heard, Kiosk Gallery, Glasgow (2021); Dependency, 16 Nicholson St, Glasgow (2019) and Fishwife Material, Leek (2017) as part of Aspirational Living. He performed at Love Unlimited’s Social Event, Glasgow International (2018). Findlay’s books include Exit Wound (self published, 2022) and Sodom’s Burr, pub. Ginny Projects, Glasgow (2019).

Curated by Jessie Krish. Special thanks to Bully Fae Collins, Rodrigo Vaiapraia, Wilf Speller, Richard and Rachel in the workshop, Anne Tetzlaff, Cell Project Space and Broadway Bookshop

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middlesexpresents · 5 years ago

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