The Kiss or Poison Boyfriend or Jesus’ Blood

About

This wholesome and rose-tinted celebration of print’s virtue is naïve and ignorant. Not only does it presume a sufficiently (but not too) affluent audience to domestically purchase and treasure these inked, stained or inscribed papers. This attitude also, and fundamentally, fails to grasp print’s insidious, corrupting and anarchic technology.

It is the scab of this insidiousness that this exhibition seeks to pick at. And it does so by exploring the traditional forms and distribution strategies of printmaking, exploring them instead as metaphor (a symbolic ‘other’), and as synecdoche (complicit and internalized).

The Kiss or Poison Boyfriend or Jesus’ Blood snares the moment of influence as a painter thumbs another artist’s monograph in the studio. It freezes and makes conscious the pass of an index finger across the screen of an iPhone, or a Sharpie across a fashion magazine page. It captures the bloom of a saturated dye, staining by capillary action, an unprimed cloth. It enacts the vulnerability of a painting’s constituent parts held in place by the gunky glue of its own paint alone. It traces the golden repair of Kintsugi pottery. It checks the connection of an embrace and mourns the pathos of the unarousable. It celebrates molding and bleaching as creative touches and it forges new forms from the grafting of two apples.

A book accompanying the exhibition with newly commissioned texts by Neil Annett, Phil King and Alaena Turner will be launched at Project 78 Gallery.

The Kiss or Poison Boyfriend or Jesus’ Blood is a LIDO project curated by Dan Howard-Birt at the invitation of Intercession Gallery whose remit is to explore print in its broadest sense.

Featuring:

Alaena Turner
Mark Siebert
Jacqui Hallum
Hannah Lees
Richard Smith
Graham Durward
Christopher Owen
Mat Jenner
Alice Hartley
Anonymous
Lara Davies 
Rebecca Guez
Dan Howard-Birt
Leonie Nagel
Corin Sworn
Sean Edwards (Marbled Reams)
Lydia Brockless
The Grantchester Pottery
Lucy Steggals