AND AS ALWAYS, THE END IS EVERYTHING.

AND AS ALWAYS
THE END IS EVERYTHING

RA TACK
FLORENCE PEAKE

1 SEPTEMBER - 1 OCTOBER 2023

CURATED BY
JACK SMURTHWAITE

Body, landscape, narrative.

We are prone to see ourselves reflected in the world. There is a fragile and precarious dance between internal and external landscapes; each side inflicting pressures on the other. Through windows and screens, seasonality, flux, and renewal are mirrored in the sweeping and sometimes inexplicable and indefensible shifts of our emotional weather charts. These two landscapes are predicated on balance, both within themselves and with each other. There is a reconciliation to be made, a bargain to be struck, whether through force, inaction or dumb luck.

IMT is thrilled to present a new display of works by Ra Tack and Florence Peake in a duo show about tension and dialogue, and how we make sense of the world.

Both Tack and Peake’s works deal in the bodily, the embodied, the material. Stretching how these terms are interpreted, both Tack and Peake approach issues of placement and rootedness in different ways – they allow us to question where we are and how we interact with the world. They are not explicitly or dogmatically ecological, or even environmental or naturalistic. Their works are formal but not figurative, they don’t show the world as it is, or will be, they show a feeling, an interaction – chemical, emotional, personal or social processes. And in this way, they are poetic – as viewers they challenge us to think beyond or between the strictly material relations between our bodies and where they are placed. Not quite idealist and never approaching reduction.

PHOTO BY PETER OTTO

RA TACK

Crawling on the floor to be near you (2023)
Oil on Belgian linen
155 x 112 cm

RA TACK

I took back your hand (2023)
Oil on Belgian linen
155 x 112 cm

Peake has spoken about how she “investigate[s] the ontology of objects, beings, humans, and encounters in the world” and these words could encompass the entire presentation.

Tack’s canvases are constellations of marks formed from hours of looking outward across Iceland’s dramatic landscapes and inward to trace the emotional journeys one goes on. Steeped in the atmosphere of the fjords, Tack’s paint seems to rise out of the earth. Stem- like streaks dance on an oversaturated cadmium yellow horizon while punches of optimistic floral reds exhale across the canvas, elsewhere dense mycorrhizal nests fester. Many canvases hold these conflicting states within them, as we all do, making them like characters, Tack avatars, that take on the atmosphere of the room they are in.

On floor, laid prostrate on a clinical white sheet, like a shrunken topographic model or hardened shallow grave is Peake’s seminal ceramic STAGE (2017). Composed of 28 ceramic titles, STAGE is a rhapsody of reference and collaboration. Formed through a choreographed performance, when the dancer Rosemary Lee wildly thrashed in tons of raw clay and was buried into the sticky stage. The work was glazed with community groups and fired in CASS Sculpture’s ‘functional sculpture’ wood-fired kiln. The work is painfully tense, presenting itself as a lease of life that conceals a body’s energy yet that is almost alchemically held in a suspended state of transformation. It is a field, a grave, a stage, a world, and a body all at once.

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Peake’s body of work is built around a simple but effective folk tale: a virgin dances herself to exhaustion and sacrifices herself to bring about the changing of the seasons, from winter to spring. Wrapped up in this one line are myriad themes – the bodily, the land, seasonality, change, age. As with many folk histories, what it also does is open up a space for the most human way of making sense of what we struggle to understand: telling stories.

PHOTO BY PETER OTTO

FLORENCE PEAKE

Stage (2017)
Wood kiln fired glazed ceramic in 24 parts
250 x 140 x 24cm
Photo by Peter Otto

MAXWELL STERLING / KENICHI IWASA

Performance at Futur Shock

Tack’s works, often produced in series, are narratives all of themselves. Reading the landscape, the colours, reflected in the intensity of layering of paint are imprinted onto the works but don’t depict them. To look into the paintings, to look slowly, is to notice how they swell, staccato marks erasing past pleasures, paint redefining emotional journeys. For Tack, painting is an act of survival and these paintings are personal testimony to that. Their titles, I Took Back Your Hand and Crawling on the Floor to Be Near You could be read at either end of a relationship’s pendulum.

In all these elements: landscape, earth, emergency, biography, embodiment, relationships, there is a sense of the tragic. In Peake’s work there is trade off, the compromise and synthesis from pity and fear as the death gives way to renewal, and in Tack’s work it is the excruciating honesty that these relationships, forged in oil, were never destined to last. We tell stories to make sense of the world, to align the interior and exterior landscapes, if only for a second.

Curated by Jack Smurthwaite

To launch the exhibition, we are thrilled to host a live performance by Maxwell Sterling / Kenichi Iwasa. Sterling and Iwasa are collaborative musicians whose improvisational pieces defy genre or categorisation. In bringing together different musical traditions and sensibilities in response to environment – whether catwalk shows or art performance – they occupy and define space in a unique way. Here, between clean Nordic atmospheres and the pregnant material of folklore-ish sacrifice, Sterling and Iwasa take on a sort of ritualistic or trance-like guise. Experimental and improvisational music is the perfect counterpoint to the geometric presentation within the exhibition. They both push at and transgress self-imposed boundaries, they break narrative norms, they take a stab at bridging the bodily and the emotional.

and as always, the end is everything. is accompanied by a soundscape recorded by Sterling and Iwasa, running throughout the exhibition.

Pictured: Ra Tack, detail of Crawling on the floor to be near you, oil on Belgian linen, 140 x 110cm; and Florence Peake, detail of STAGE, wood kiln fired glazed ceramic in 24 parts, 250 x 140 x 24cm. Peake is represented by Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

With support from the Exhibitions Hub, Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.