↳ Exhibitions

Jesse Darling at Chapter NY

February 6, 2018

Artist: Jesse Darling

Exhibition title: Support Level

Venue: Chapter NY, New York, US

Date: January 26 – March 11, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY

Chapter NY is excited to present an exhibition of new work by the artist Jesse Darling. This will be JD’s first solo show in the United States and will focus on new paintings and sculptures.

JD’s practice engages forms of embodiment particular to the modern subject and its ulterior expressions. Informed by their personal experience as well as (counter)historical narratives, JD explores the inherent vulnerability of being a body, and how the inevitable mortality of living things translates to civilizations and structures. This “precarious optimism”—the idea that living beings, societies, and technologies are fundamentally fallible and fungible—underscores the artist’s practice.

For their exhibition at Chapter, JD draws from the clinical as a structural and social form of abjection. Mobility aids are contorted towards the corporeal, simultaneously rigid and lipid, both the object of support and its inferred subject. A commode chair crawls along the floor, as a hygiene curtain reveals a gaping wound; health advice posters in asemic script hang with uncertainty, over-painted as though vandalized—architectures of the care-industrial complex pressed, distressed, and in pain.

At once activated and incapacitated, these sculptures exert a precarious force somewhere between marked resilience and physical decline. They exist in between being and burden, where bodily atrophy collaborates with the prosthetic to forge new forms of agency. The works struggle against their own affliction and our own comfortable assumptions: heaving, synthetic, and all too keenly felt.

Jesse Darling works between London, UK and Berlin, Germany. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Galerie Sultana, Paris and Arcadia Missa, London as well as the artist’s curated exhibition, “Mene Mene Tekel Parsin,” at Wysing Art Centre, UK. In 2017, JD’s work was featured in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale, IT. In addition, selected group exhibitions include those at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Sharjah Biennial, Beirut; Company Gallery, NY; and Hessel Museum at CCS Bard, Hudson, NY. They have received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, Poland; The Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; and Volksbühne Berlin, Germany, among others. JD has published texts in print and online, including The Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt Press, 2015); Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2015); and Art After the Internet (Cornerhouse Books, 2014).

Jesse Darling, Support Level, 2018, exhibition view, Chapter NY, New York

Jesse Darling, Collapsed Cane, 2017, Steel, aluminum, rubber and lacquer, 75 × 60 × 0.5 cm (29 1/2 × 23 5/8 × 1/4 inches)

Jesse Darling, Crawling Cane, 2017, Steel, aluminum, rubber and lacquer, 73 × 40 × 20 cm (28 3/4 × 15 3/4 × 7 7/8 inches)

Jesse Darling, Comfort Station, 2017, Steel, aluminum, rubber and lacquer, 78 × 140 × 85 cm (30 3/4 × 55 1/8 × 33 1/2 inches)

Jesse Darling, Cut Curtain, 2017, PVC, 350 × 220 cm (137 3/4 × 86 5/8 inches)

Jesse Darling, Compartment Syndrome (hanging in there), 2018, Grip bar, plastic bags, plastic tube, zip tie, Ovarall: 66 × 49 × 5 inches (167.64 × 124.46 × 12.70 cm), Grip Bar: 50 × 5 × 5 cm (19 5/8 × 2 × 2 inches), Grip Bar: 5 × 50 × 5 cm (2 × 19 5/8 × 2 inches), Grip Bar: 5 × 50 × 5 cm (2 × 19 5/8 × 2 inches)

Jesse Darling, Eccentric Contraction (still standing), 2017, Steel, aluminum, rubber and lacquer, 233 × 75 × 97 cm (91 3/4 × 29 1/2 × 38 1/4 inches)

Jesse Darling, Plexus, 2017, Back brace, mild steel, lacquer, grip bar, cool pack., 73 × 50 × 20 cm (28 3/4 × 19 5/8 × 7 7/8 inches)

Jesse Darling, Untitled (waiting room poster/municipal hospital series), 2017, Ink on paper, ink on plastic, with aluminum frame, 65 × 47 × 2 cm (25 5/8 × 18 1/2 × 3/4 inches)

Jesse Darling, Untitled (waiting room poster/municipal hospital series), 2017, Ink on paper, ink on plastic, with aluminum frame, Diptych Each: 47 × 35 × 2 cm (18 1/2 × 13 3/4 × 3/4 inches)

Jesse Darling, Untitled (waiting room poster/municipal hospital series), 2017, Ink on paper, ink on plastic, with aluminum frame, 47 × 35 × 2 cm (18 1/2 × 13 3/4 × 3/4 inches)

Jesse Darling, Untitled (waiting room poster/municipal hospital series), 2017, Ink on paper, ink on plastic, with aluminum frame, 65 × 47 × 2 cm (25 5/8 × 18 1/2 × 3/4 inches)