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Chris Thompson at Brockley Gardens, London

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Garages are funny things, they make an interesting site for exhibitionism. 

And as it happens, so do doggos.

One is a site of storage. A space for the physical archiving of memory, activity. The favourite trope setting of the sitcom writer looking to set up a heartfelt conversation about the past in a typically hack fashion. it is the dumping ground, where things go to become junk, lose value and become relics, signposts and artefacts of both a person’s life, as well as a culture. To enter such a space is nothing less than an act of excavation, implicitly voyeuristic. A good space then, to fictionalise.  

The dog on the other hand is fundamentally a site of projection. Its domestication is our first act of biological appropriation as a species. Moulding its body like plastic for hunting, now we shape it through visual culture, stamped onto in order to convey stock emotions, responses and moods in a system of constant output, recycling, mimesis- the ‘Doggo’. 

The funny thing about a repetitious element circulating in culture is the power it ends up gaining. The humble sitcom demonstrates the power of trope quite nicely, in fact. We all know Seinfeld. By borrowing 90’s sitcom adverts as a skeleton to graft our Doggos onto, can we help them take a walkies back towards agency?

Can the work inherit a ‘knowing’ quality, authenticity and authority where by curiously, man’s best friend becomes the means to unpick the role of appropriation, a cypher? 

Not so loyal after all. 

29.6.19 — 12.7.19

Curated by Billy Crosby and Thomas Greig

Brockley Gardens

'Old Sun, New Sun', Group Show Curated by Andrew Sung Taek Ingersoll at Et al., S

'The Houses Of The Serpent Bearer. The 9th House' by Mónica Mays & Flora Yin-Wong

'Dream Archipelago', Group Show Curated by Sergey Guskov at Smena, Kazan

'Eternal Flame', Group Show at Shore, Vienna

'Cosmovisions', Group Show at Medusa Offspace, Brussels

'No Time To Explain' by Paul Robas at Solito, Naples

'Night Rider' by Yan Posadsky at Devyatnadtsat’, Moscow

'Funding Emotions' by Magnus Frederik Clausen and Kaare Ruud at Cantina, Aarhus

'What I felt for you was love', Group Show at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'Mirror Stage' by Bora Akinciturk and Ella Fleck at Shipton, London

‘Millions Now Living Will Never Die!’ by Ian Swanson at Plague Space, Krasnodar

'VEGAN' by Jack Jubb at house of spouse, Vienna

'Fresh Hell' by Jonah Pontzer at Rose Easton, London

'It's quite like Guggenheim', Group Show at Ringcenter 1, Berlin

'OUTER DARKNESS', Off-Site Project by Allyson Packer in 1698 GALISTEO, SANTA FE

'mareas' by Elizabeth Burmann at Galeria Patricia Ready, Santiago

'Vape Cloud Premonition' by Sam Hutchinson at Forth, Nottingham

'Punch-Drunk' by Yutaro Ishikawa at LAID BUG, Tokyo

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