Cabin Fever

About

CABIN FEVER is a post-studio-residency showcase exhibition of works produced within Usual Business over the previous weeks as part of a September Residency Series.

Gabriel Bodinetz (b. 2002) is a visual artist living and working in London. Through his practice, Gabriel aims to investigate the collective yearning to understand mortality and self-consciousness; the subjective nature of thinking, feeling, and acting. Examining how mundane objects, familiar faces, and sacred places are worn down under the weight of late-capitalism’s existentialism. The paintings reflect the perpetual stains imprinted by love and grief on the human condition. Cryptic recollections of the jagged landscapes, putrid personage and perishing flora and fauna witnessed in dreams bestow ambiguous motifs upon the work; when impulsively smudged and scraped the configurations accelerate and deteriorate amongst murky backgrounds. Each canvas is merely a representation of misplaced fragments from the splintered vessel that clumsily navigates Gabriel’s own memories, forging a personal mythology through hazy memories of witnessed gestures, expressions and surroundings.

Dylan Coates (b. 1998) is a London based artist working primarily within the realms of moving image and video installation. His work is often highly personal and semi-autobiographical, holding context of memory, narrative and its relationship to visual grammar and film language while exploring themes reflecting the sensitivity and darkness of the human psyche. After graduating from Chelsea College of Arts in 2021 he went on to exhibit his biggest work yet, multi-projection installation piece ‘House On Fire’, at AMP Gallery in 2022 to critical acclaim. In this series titled ‘When Will I Get My Money Right’ he returns to painting, the artist's preliminary practice and a medium that he has not experimented with in 2 years. Each piece uses visceral, thick brush strokes and a very specific colour palette to create other-worldly compositions in a gestural and brash style, while repeated imagery and symbolism creates a through-line hinting at a narrative. Figures and shapes find themselves scratched into the work, not directly a part of these worlds but living on top of them as if they are toilet-wall defacements. These works once again seem to explore heavy and personal themes; feelings of inner-sadness and a sense of loneliness are juxtaposed through the crude and witty style of painting. Bringing the series together is a 10 minute experimental video piece presented in the centre of the space, containing writings, photographs and moving images created over the past 6 months.

At the core of Callum Jones’ (b. 2001) practice lies a deep interest in collective biography. Prying evidence from prolonged engagement with urban archaeology, relentless observation of personal and external legacy and treating transitional spaces as witnesses to the lived experience. These themes weave their way into his work through a ritualistic approach to making. The mixed-media paintings, sculptures and drawings (often collaborative) that result from this process display a careful attention to the intimacy of the written word and a slapstick approach to surface. Jones lift’s language from every nook of the metropolitan environment, from church facades to club cubicles, using these events of instinct as provocations to paint. 

Growing up between Germany and Austria, Amelie Schlaeffer (b. 1999) is completing her BA in Fine Arts with Creative Computing at Central Saint Martins. Her practice revolves around paradoxes that emerge in our digital age, which are reiterated through relating and pulling them back to analog objects and mechanisms through installation, painting and sculpture. Schlaeffer works with a desire to draw parallels between reality and online, making the two intertwine and become symbiotic to make sense of an experience in constant overstimulation. Her series of paintings, sculpture and photographs within Cabin Fever, composed under the title Magic Lasso, use a photo editing tool to grapple with over-curation, censorship and skewing of perspective. The separation of space within and outside of the Magic Lasso works to censor surroundings; what must be seen and what mustn’t. It serves as an exploration of the emerging need to artificially produce and be in control of one’s image, and pushes the Magic Lasso as a utilitarian object placed in our world to streamline our perception. The question of what could be were this tool to become a reality is playfully explored through a series of photographs taken throughout the residency. Four displaced characters found on one of many vacations on Google Street View are treated as found objects, pulled into the real world where their backgrounds disappear on a blank canvas. They emulate an attempt of re-grounding, being reproduced in all detail in a bid to find presence in a passing image.