Artist: P. Staff
Exhibition title: Full Rotation
Venue: Ordet, Milan, Italy
Date: May 10 – June 15, 2024
Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Ordet, Milan
Ordet is pleased to present Full Rotation, the first solo exhibition by artist P. Staff in Italy.
Staff uses installation, poetry, and collage to question the hierarchies and boundaries of the human subject, often exploring what constitutes what the artist calls “the livable, the killable, and the undead.” Their work draws from a wide range of inspirations, materials, and settings, including their studies in modern dance, astrology, and end- of-life care. Full Rotation presents three recent works reorganized to stage a new site-specific installation.
The exhibition opens with To Live a Good Life I (2023), a single distorted fluorescent print encased in gelatinous resin and supported by an acid-etched aluminum frame. The image—neon and curiously irradiated—depicts a heavily manipulated scene of a body wrapped or enshrouded, possibly dead, as part of an undefined ritual. Floating in clear resin, the image is surrounded by a burst of neon- pigmented sulfur and ash. Staff has often cited an interest in the corrosive characteristics of acid, blood, hormones, and other volatile materials in their practice, using these elements to evoke a particular chemiluminescence: a fantastic toxicity. In the central exhibition space, the installation On Gravity (2022) is restaged for the first time in Europe. An imposing series of large black boxes in various sizes, described by Staff as voids, is displayed against a static red light installation. Amongst the boxes are stacks of blush pink towels that serve as pillows for glass bottles, each filled with a substance designed to mimic the artist’s stomach acid. Here, the presence/absence of a body—and that of the artist—may be read as at once violently present in the room and stretched into the infinite—tender, wet, irradiated, sulfurous, dissolving.
The adjacent room is taken over by a suite of holographic fans; flickering images and words take on a chimeric presence, situated between structuralist film, optical illusion, and contemporary phantasmagoria. Simultaneously lyrical, sculptural, and filmic, a fragmented poem—which gives the work its title, In Ekstase (2023)—summons an atmosphere of intoxication, unease, and desire. Are these words coming from the end of time or from a delirious self forced into a paroxysmal state of being? Staff describes a world impossible to live in, suspended in a state of excess life, excess feeling, ecstasy.
maybe happy?
once dead—
two times / undead,
living,
/ now it’s living /
outside of me— /
ekstase.
Full Rotation continues Staff’s ongoing examination of the exchange between bodies, ecosystems, and institutions from a queer and trans perspective. Citing biopolitics, necropolitics, film theory, poetry, and performance, the artist’s work probes the constitutive force of violence integral to the making and undoing of a contemporary living subject.
Full Rotation is realized in collaboration with Samuele Piazza and with the support of OGR Torino.
BIO
P. Staff (b. 1987) lives and works in Los Angeles and London.
Staff received their BA in fine art and contemporary critical studies from Goldsmiths, University of London (2009). They completed the LUX Associate Artists Programme and studied contemporary dance at The Place in London (2011).
Solo exhibitions have been held at Kunsthalle Basel (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022, 2018); LUMA, Arles (2021); Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015). Their work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, New York (2024); the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); and the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021), and they have participated in group exhibitions at Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021); 47 Canal, New York (2021); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); and Gasworks, London (2016).
