Exhibition
Details of Tenderness
15 Nov 2019 – 24 Nov 2019
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Address
- 5 Glasshouse Walk
- London
England - SE11 5ES
- United Kingdom
For the first edition of our Open Call Residency, Subsidiary Projects is proud to present London based artist Alex McNamee’s new site-specific installation.
About
PV. 15th November 6:30 - 9:30 pm
Open by appointment from the 16th to the 24th November 2019
subsidiaryprojects@gmail.com
Vauxhall Gardens Community Centre, 5 Glasshouse Walk, Lambeth, London SE11 5ES
Alex McNamee’s practice is highly physical and shaped by the surroundings that it inhabits. Her work explores identity’s mutable qualities within oneself and the space around us.
Understanding language as a tool, she focuses on how labels modify objects - the way they perform shifts with each word we use. Through utilitarian materials such as sand, plaster, concrete and wood she points towards the functionality we associate with objects; poking them to expose deeper, truer versions of themselves.
For this exhibition, Alex has occupied Subsidiary Projects’ studio for four weeks generating a new body of work. “These are details of tenderness, read from left to right or right to left or right, left, right. Objects become a sentence or a list of drawings separated by commas, they are sore/tender and tenderly comforting moments, they are tender matter, the drawings break in half, they fall into inanities, it happens. We are matters that live and die in matter, matter turning into objects and then a sentence and then matter again.”
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Alex McNamee
Objects, whether they are in a landscape, on a screen or in the hand, change in appearance, meaning and function any time anyone looks at, thinks about or touches them. I lived with three smokers and any object that had a dent in it became an ashtray. They saw a seashell completely differently to me. They turned matter into what they wanted it to be. They could change the name and purpose and shape, they could say ‘pass the ashtray’ and I would grab the seashell. My work investigates language’s link to matter, how we label objects, determine how they perform, functionally, and aesthetically.
Alex McNamee (b. 1990) is a British/Canadian artist who lives in London. She received a BA from The Slade School of Fine Art, London, graduating with a first-class degree in 2013 and was selected for the 2014 edition of Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She was shortlisted for the Nigel Greenwood Prize in 2018, and has been an artist in residence at Antony Gormley's High House Residency (UK, 2017), Fljotstunga Artistic Residency (Iceland, 2015) as well as Tacita Dean’s Research Laboratory, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, (Italy, 2014).
Alex’s work has been exhibited internationally, including Casa da Dona Gisele in Brazil, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich and SPARK, New York.
______Subsidiary Projects
We are an independent artist-led project founded in 2017. Our aim is to support emerging artists and curators by offering physical spaces and support to try new concepts and ideas.