Artist: Gabriele Beveridge
Exhibition title: Eternity Anyways
Venue: CHEWDAY’S, London, UK
Date: May 18 – July 9, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and CHEWDAY’S, London
Hanging in the window, Grace and Mercy, 2016 takes its name from a previous inhabitant of the gallery premises – a fashion retailer whose signage still remains ghostly visible above.
An arrangement of found images and objects, the work depicts two near-identical portraits of a woman – advertisements found by Beveridge in separate shop windows. Cropped from their branding and framed side-by-side these high production, commercial images – once finely tuned for mass appeal and geographical reach – are sapped of their intended power and rendered elusive.
Clouds I, II, and III are three large scale works made up of shop fitting panels – some powder-coated in pristine pastel tones, others grubby and dilapidated in the discarded state that they were found in. Arranged into grids they evoke the sublime abstract paintings of Agnes Martin or the monuments of an unidentified civilization. On the inside of the gallery window cling chrome garment rails amplified in their abundance to the point of extraterrestrial absurdity. Hand-blown glass bubbles punctuate the exhibition. Slumped over the works, they reflect and distort the rigid metal retail structures that underpin them.
Through strategies of selection, framing and recombination Beveridge reconfigures the hierarchies of commercial images and objects. Her diverse assemblages seek to examine the relationship between the shared access that everyone might have to the visual languages that saturate our contemporary existence and the special access that each of us has to personal memory and private experience. Less interested in a prescriptive rhetoric on consumer culture than exploring how the poetic and the personal can be addressed under contemporary conditions, Beveridge sits on the line between ambivalence and celebration – investigating a fascination between the lure of consumer images and objects and the values that they preserve and perpetuate.
Gabriele Beveridge was born in 1985 in Hong Kong. She lives and works in London, UK. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art, London in 2010 and a BA in photography from Falmouth College of Arts in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Mainland, MOT International, Brussels, BE, 2015; Gold Diamond Park, Elizabeth Dee, New York, US, 2014; Health and Strength, La Salle de Bains, Lyon, FR, 2014; By Mistake or Design, Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK, 2014; Incidental Healer, Van Horbourg, Zurich, CH, 2013. Recent group exhibitions include Folly, EMALIN, Stirling, Scotland, UK, 2016; National Gallery 2: Empire, CHEWDAY’S, London, UK, 2015; Summertime, Gallerist, Istanbul, TR, 2015; Pre-Pop to Post-Human: Collage in the Digital Age, Hayward Gallery, London, UK, 2015; Breeze, Deweer Gallery, Otegem, BE, 2014; Between the lines, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan, PR, 2014; Display, University of Connecticut Contemporary Art Gallery, Connecticut, US, 2014; La Chose Encadree, Glasgow International, Scotland, UK, 2014; Comrades of Time Comrades of Time, curated by CHEWDAY’S, Cell Project Space, London, UK, 2013; CHEWDAY’S Bar, CHEWDAY’S, Berlin, DE, 2013; Desire, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, US, 2013.
Gabriele Beveridge, Grace & Mercy, 2016
Found posters, feathers, hand-blown glass, pearlescent glass, chrome shop fitting, artist frames, chains, dimensions variable
Gabriele Beveridge, Grace & Mercy, 2016
Found posters, feathers, hand-blown glass, pearlescent glass, chrome shop fitting, artist frames, chains, dimensions variable
Gabriele Beveridge, Grace & Mercy, 2016 (detail)
Found posters, feathers, hand-blown glass, pearlescent glass, chrome shop fitting, artist frames, chains, dimensions variable
Gabriele Beveridge, Dead Skin Living, 2016
Chrome, hand-blown glass, 140 x 125 x 30 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Dead Skin Living, 2016 (detail)
Chrome, hand-blown glass, 140 x 125 x 30 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Clouds (III), 2016. Found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass, 300 cm x 250 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Clouds (III), 2016 (detail). Found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass, 300 cm x 250 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Clouds (I), 2016. Found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass, 300 cm x 250 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Clouds (I), 2016 (detail). Found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass, 300 cm x 250 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Clouds (II), 2016. Found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass, 300 cm x 250 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Clouds (II), 2016 (detail). Found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass, 300 cm x 250 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Daydream Lotion, 2016. Stainless steel sinks, rope, hand-blown glass, powder-coated MDF, 104 x 92 x 40 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Daydream Lotion, 2016
Stainless steel sinks, rope, hand-blown glass, powder-coated MDF, 104 x 92 x 40 cm