The Very Best of London’s Frieze Week: Outside of the Tent

Elephant

‘The Very Best of London’s Frieze Week: Outside of the Tent’

14 Oct 2023

Gilda Bruno

Taking over both galleries and spanning large-scale sculpture, installation, and wall-based work, the showcase sees the Huddersfield-born artist turn to his mediums of choice to immerse the audience in a multisensory journey imbued with a disorienting feel. Hinting at the shallowness of contemporary beauty standards and the sterility of fame, a video work featuring re-adapted stills from Hedi Slimane’s Celine Autumn/ Winter 23 fashion campaign faces viewers with “models projecting an effortless nonchalance behind sunglasses” in a striking contrast between the real and the artificial. To complete the piece, the artist has enriched the surface with vinyl and painted canvas in a bold, thought-provoking statement that reflects his view of deconstruction, fandom and appropriation. Workplace is transformed into a neon-lit, obscure space evoking night danger. Inhabited by aphoristic, luminous messages, strange and familiar sculptural elements, the installation embodies “the notion of strength as a defence mechanism”. A critique of the privatisation of urban space, the showcase symbolically brings the public to experience the constraints forced upon passers-by by institutions of control, the physical and emotional uneasiness of which stays with the audience even after leaving the gallery.