YOU WERE HIGH WHEN I WAS DOOMED

YOU WERE HIGH
WHEN I WAS DOOMED

THORBJØRN ANDERSEN
DANIEL DAVIES
BENEDICT DREW
KRISTIAN KRAGELUND
LINDSEY MENDICK
FLORE NOVÉ-JOSSERAND
GORDON SHRIGLEY

13 JANUARY - 15 MARCH 2017

So, we were on Skype with IMT Gallery’s director Lindsay Friend who said, “Take a walk around the block and put down what you have just seen.” She leans back in her chair [does she have a favourite chair designer? Insert make/model], her eyes wandering round the top of the room as if a thousand ghostly pictures were suspended there, “The show is a bricolage of elements, a canvas of what we’ve just seen, mashed up to create new possibilities.” We think she be testing us.

In shock, not sure how to respond. So the show is curated by committee via Skype, we got it mouth-to-mouth. The works can be remnants – an old abandoned sci-fi movie city – but the images have gone dark or been rewritten – they were scraps of cars (“…half a person cut in two by a car…”), underground inhibitors / black-market statins (“…reflections in shop windows…”) a nuclear missile (“…passing faces, a jumble of fragments…”) everything marked, everything ‘membered.

We are looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul, what remains of the artefacts of contemporary listless, aporetic modernity. An earlier email reads: “It’s a show that has something to do with endings and afterendings. Scrappy fragments are good for mulch. Frames make good screens. Rebuilding a future.” You wait, you’ll see.

#IWasDoomed

THORBJØRN ANDERSEN & FLORE NOVÈ-JOSSERAND

Group Hug [pollution]

The walls of the gallery have been spray painted to resemble some kind of toxic sky, with poisonous greens and billowing hues of black and purple. It creates a trail of changing colours like some kind of Romantic painter’s nightmare, through to its charred end. This, along with a pair of old tyres is the work of Thorbjørn Andersen and Flore Nové-Josserand acts as the theatrical backdrop for the rest of the show.

- THEO TURPIN | THIS IS TOMORROW

GORDON SHRIGLEY

Chalk drawing series (2014)

LINDSEY MENDICK

Simply Devine (2016)

[The] painted cut out by Lindsey Mendick is like a heroine in a dystopian Hollywood franchise, a trope which in this context becomes two dimensional in more ways than one. Yet she is also the humour in this exhibition, with her jewel encrusted jacket like some cast off from a Baz Luhrmann film, slightly bashfully averting her gaze from the viewer, using her long locks to protect her modesty while all around her turns into dust.

- THEO TURPIN | THIS IS TOMORROW

KRISTIAN KRAGELUND
UNTITLED 4 (2014)

Discarded steel plates pressed on paper
76 x 56 cm (29.9 x 22.0 in)
Unique