TTTT

In this group show, curated by Sarah Williams, London based artist Nicole Morris presents the digital video ‘Your love will fade’ (2012) which has been reconfigured by a large scale rubbing ‘Stud’ (2014), intersecting the gallery space with a denim-like textured crotch. The architectural intervention, resembling a billboard, creates a semi-shadowed area where the projected video loops. This setting highlights the artist’s intention to design a non-cinematic, transitory viewing experience.
Morris considers denim a mainstream, reproduced and fashionable item which is in many ways like the tactile experience of handling bank notes, something shared across all levels of the society. The investigation of materiality and gender and its manifestation in the digital is set within a narrative of the artist’s journey to heterotopias of the American Midwest and its land art. The two presented works are brought together by a play with the illusion of three dimensional surfaces; flat hand-drawn shadows in bright blue sets of the video where a female performer scrubs and manipulates sculptural surfaces reflect in the texture of the wall piece. Developed by casting and scaling up items of denim clothing, ‘Stud’ reveals marks made by intense rubbing which create a visual link to the performer’s skin, tainted with fake tan. By questioning the dynamics of the embodied touch and body in the digital landscape, Morris’s work experiments with the way in which a tactile experience is delivered through a screen, with the flat surfaces bringing the effect of her work quite close to tactile aspects of ASMR videos presented on YouTube.
The second moving image work presented in this feature is a new 16 mm film, ‘Currency’ (2014), commissioned for a performance at Jerwood Space. In the performance a group of women pass objects from daily routines in a seemingly infinite loop. Associative of feminine tasks connected to daily labour, the performance will be delivered by the gallery staff using a sculptural cast made by the artist where performers place their hands after operating the film.

Hana Janeckova

Nicole Morris(1986) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (2011). Recent solo exhibitions include: Art Projects at the London Art Fair, London (2014); Impressions, Bold Tendencies, London; After Work, Locomotion, London; Same Husband, Space In Between, London (2013) and A Romance in Two Parts, Galeria Magda Bellotti, Madrid (2012). Selected group exhibitions include: Young London 2013, V22, London; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2012, ICA London and Liverpool biennial; 20 Rue de Jacob — A salon for Performance and Other Happenings, Galleria Rajatila, Finland; Claire Baily, Nicole Morris and Ben Schumacher, Laure Genillard, London (2011) and By Means of Matter, Generator Projects, Dundee (2010). In 2013 she was nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women.
Sarah Williams is Gallery Manager and Curator within the Jerwood Visual Arts exhibition programme at Jerwood Space. She curates exhibitions in the Project Space and also works as an independent curator, artist and lecturer. ‘TTTT’ (2014) responded to recent developments and concerns amongst artists who are exploring sculpture and screen-based practices in new forms and materiality, in relation to language, technology, image dissemination, sentimentality and anxiety.