IMT presents Givin u coy givin u smize, a show of work by Paola Ciarska, Sadé Mica and Salut C’est Cool.
Ciarska paints a girl entering the gallery, taking pictures on their smartphone. The camera flips into selfie mode and they see their own eye. Their eye is like a convex mirror in an old painting. A thumb blocks the view from their smartphone screen. It blocks your eye like a moon.
Givin u coy givin u smize is an Instagram post by Mica. Their thumb is nearer to them than their phone screen and, for a split second, stops as they give face. Their scrolling is a doubling over, like polymer clay, and turns the screen for a split second into a cast of your hand…
INSTALLATION VIEW
Photo by Yuechen Wang
Some odd objects by the French art/music collective Salut C’est Cool turn the gallery into a soft world in hard pictures. Their thumb presses so firmly on their phone that the screen cracks and the apps become a dark mass. Although this doesn’t happen. Your thumb is pig-headed.
IMT presents Givin u coy givin u smize from their smartphone screen. Fragments of paint flake off the convex mirror of an old painting. Their thumb is doubling over like polymer clay. Your eye is a dark mass.
Your eye is like a convex mirror in an old painting. Your eye lets out an inner life. Your fingers press into the sides of the phone. Confusion! The phone twists, doubling over like polymer clay. Turns out that the apps are not made of light but are painted onto the phone in acrylic. Squeezing, pressing, and they crack open, flakes of paint moving like the crust of the Earth. You can squeeze so tightly that the whole world is crushed into a cast of your hand.
INSTALLATION VIEW
Photo by Yuechen Wang
Paola Ciarska’s small yet intricate paintings combine elaborate, colourful interiors with enigmatic, often naked, women. The spaces these women inhabit are often based on the real homes of people she’s met, where they pose, smoke, work on laptops, have sex, eat takeaways, check social media, and communicate with unknown contacts in the outside world. More recently these environments have become dreamscapes, interlocking rooms of impossible architecture whose iconic, brightly coloured contents oscillate between the imaginary and mundane.
PAOLA CIARSKA
UNTITLED 1 – 4 (2020)
Gouache on board
19 x 13.5 cm (7.4 x 5.3 in)
Unique
Sadé Mica is an artist based in Manchester whose work explores their experience of navigating the world as a queer, black person. Works include videos of Sadé moving in urban and rural landscapes, and binders embroidered with their words. Their works act as documents of body and emotions and, through this, presentations of an identity that is often met with contempt and confusion.
Watch excerpts of Sade’s In the Green and With Interruptions below…
SADÉ MICA
Green Taffeta With Text (2020)
INSTALLATION VIEW
Photo by Yuechen Wang
SALUT C’EST COOL
Multiprise #3 (2019)
Polymer clay
Size variable
Unique
Salut C’est Cool are a band and artist collective from Paris whose work ranges from DIY electro-punk music, made-for-web video clips and polymer clay sculptures. Their art practice is a collaborative, post-Internet, deliberately amateurish experimentalism that appears as interactions with everyday objects and places in ways that often come across as humorous, absurd or provocative.
