Condo 2020: Emalin hosting COOPER COLE

Artists: Nicholas Cheveldave, Bjorn Copeland, Georgia Dickie

Exhibition title: Condo 2020: Emalin hosting COOPER COLE

Venue: Emalin, London, UK

Date: January 11 – February 8, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, COOPER COLE, Toronto and Emalin, London

Emalin is pleased to present a new body of work by Canadian artist Nicholas Cheveldave, alongside works by American artist Bjorn Copeland and a new floor-based installation by Canadian artist Georgia Dickie, exhibited by Cooper Cole.

Nicholas Cheveldave’s practice brings together photography, painting, digital rendering and sculpture to form densely layered accumulations of imagery. For Condo, the artist has produced a new series of collages on dibond, a composite conventionally used for outdoor signage. In this series of works, a surplus of imagery is created through the collection and repetition of visually similar but categorically varying photographs, taken by the artist and appropriated from the internet. Interested in how the visual economy of consumer culture guides our understanding and communication of identity, Cheveldave’s clusters enact the inundating logic of our contemporary relationship to the digital image. Across the exhibited surfaces, dozens of snapshots of nuclear family units, their homes and mundane possessions map the coordinates of suburban existence while emptying these contained existences of specificity and meaning. What remains is the idea of the object, its shape, colour and proximity to commodity.

Georgia Dickie’s floor-perched grid installation is comprised of found objects, paper bags and cutlery arranged into stacks of material information. The boundaries of Dickie’s installation are elastic, expanding and contracting to suit the space in which the work is shown. As is often the case, the components are destined to be disassembled, re-entered into inventory and then discarded or reused following the exhibition. In her practice, Dickie transforms off-cast detritus into both fixed sculptural formations and fleeting installations, posing questions about the disparities between each. The constituent elements are often chosen arbitrarily based on a system of availability and proximity. Un-adhered, balanced and temporal, these discarded objects navigate the logistical complexities of an artwork’s existence, a lifespan that exceeds exhibition alone. Exploring formal intersections of grandiose gesture and small detail, the works look at the refuse of a society born to look, value, produce, consume and discard.

Bjorn Copeland approaches his practice by making creative content out of the mundane cultural and societal waste, essentially using decisions someone else has made. By reducing the source material down to its most basic and dominant formal or purposefully intended function, the basis for reconfiguration is set. It also serves as a way to participate in a highly saturated materialistic culture by side-stepping the role of consumer. The process of recombining anything that has a negative value with other information or elements elevates the source material to something with a heightened conceptual, formal or societal value.

A text by Nicholas Cheveldave accompanies the exhibition.

Installation view, Condo 2020, Emalin presenting works by Nicholas Cheveldave, hosting Cooper Cole with works by Bjorn Copeland and Georgia Dickie, London, UK, January 2020

Nicholas Cheveldave, Worm Hole pt. 2, 2019, photolaminate and mixed media on dibond, 180 × 122 × 3 cm

Nicholas Cheveldave, Worm Hole pt. 2, 2019, photolaminate and mixed media on dibond, 180 × 122 × 3 cm (detail)

Nicholas Cheveldave, Worm Hole pt. 4, 2019, photolaminate and mixed media on dibond, 180 × 122 × 3 cm

Nicholas Cheveldave, Worm Hole pt. 6, 2019, photolaminate and mixed media on dibond, 180 × 122 × 3 cm (detail)

Installation view, Condo 2020, Emalin presenting works by Nicholas Cheveldave, hosting Cooper Cole with works by Bjorn Copeland and Georgia Dickie, London, UK, January 2020

Bjorn Copeland, Compress/Sustain NO, 2015, vinyl and grommets, 196 x 145 cm

Bjorn Copeland, Compress/Sustain Print Error, 2015, found billboard and grommets, 196 x 145 cm

Installation view, Condo 2020, Emalin presenting works by Nicholas Cheveldave, hosting Cooper Cole with works by Bjorn Copeland and Georgia Dickie, London, UK, January 2020