Exhibition

Artifice, (Ripped)

15 Mar 2023 – 22 Mar 2023

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

Free admission

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'Artifice, (Ripped'), curated by Tarzan Kingofthejungle.

Exhibiting artists:
Panos Profitis
Tarzan Kingofthejungle
Tom Hardwick-Allan
Won-Joon Choi

About

Exhibition text by Maria Dragoi

I met Tarzan last week. In his basement studio right by Covent Garden, he told me a story about descending into a graphite mine in Sri Lanka. Surrounded by artefacts from this story he had constructed, pseudo-souvenirs if you will, I waited to find out what he might have found in the mine. Clearly he’d been looking for something - everyone who writes a story is in a way seeking, as much as they are telling. Through the process of laying pen to paper (or more likely fingertip to plastic key), a story uncoils and tries to produce something more than its constituent parts.


In the end, there was nothing at the bottom of the mine shaft. No revelation, no cigar.


There’s a lot to be said for looking for something and not finding it, for expecting a thing to be more than itself. The theme of that burgeoning hope being axed by the frankness of materiality is present throughout the works in the exhibition. ‘Artifice, (Ripped)’ brings together four artists to investigate how we remember through artefacts and texts. There are two stories that guide the narrative of the exhibition - one taking place thousands of miles above sea level, the other hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. Tarzan KingoftheJungle writes about his experiences in the mines, whilst Won-Joon Choi narrates his experience getting lost in the Alps. Neither story sticks too tightly to the truth, taking liberties in the style of Chinese whispers, warping and unfixed. Tom Hardwick-Allan sculpts crows which act as a medium between the two, portents of death for situations that could easily have gone awry, but didn’t. Made out of plastic bags, the crows hint at the same desire to see something in the mundane that isn’t really there. Panos Profitis has sculpted the goats Choi claims he met on the mountain in his story, only Profitis hadn’t read Won’s story before making the pieces. The curator has brought them together because they can act as a visual aid, a false artefact, hailing from Greece - not the Alps. This is fitting for an exhibition about the tendency to apply a false paradigm onto experience, to project onto it more than it is, or can be.


It deserves to be said that the mine Tarzan discusses is actually more than it might appear. The Sakura mine was the biggest producer of graphite in Sri Lanka until the second world war, and boasts some of the purest and most dense graphite veins in the world. Similarly, the Alps, crows, and mountain goats hold their own prowess and mystery, distinct and independent from our engagement with them. The exhibition demonstrates our continuous attempts to preserve through distillation, be it in sculpture, painting, poem, story - we know that we are doomed to fail, and that the end result will necessarily be an artifice, but that never dissuades us from trying.

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