San Mei Gallery is pleased to present Tamara and the Swan by Josie Perry and Daphne Simons. This will be the inaugural exhibition in San Mei Gallery’s new public-facing window space, presenting a series of micro-exhibitions by emerging contemporary artists. Open 24 hours a day, this new programming strand facillitates responsive and exciting small-scale exhibitions in a hypervisible context. All artworks are available for sale, supporting emerging artists with income as well as fundraising for San Mei Gallery’s other non-commercial artistic programmes.
Josie Perry and Daphne Simons’s collaborative practice expands the fictional world of comics through video, multimedia installations, sculpture and drawing. Their comic book series Plasma Springs stems from a quick-fire script writing process fictionalising figures from art history and popular media, a form of surreal homage that is absurd, sincere, irreverent and camp. Presented in this exhibition is a single artwork, Tamara and the Swan, one of a series of colour pencil drawings produced by Josie Perry that crystallise scenarios and encounters between characters from the worlds of their collaboratively produced comic.
The latest instalment of the comic, Plasma Spring: Halloweel (Glom Press, 2022), borrows elements from the biography of painter Leonor Fini to reimagine the much-mythologised scene of queer women in 1930s interwar Paris. A whirlwind vampire narrative involving eel-infested royals, frozen swans and a sapphic commune ensues in Fini’s Parisian apartment. Riffing on the lesbian vampire horror trope, Perry and Simons exploit the vampire genre to irreverently imagine representations of queer family and polyamorous relationships.
Tamara and the Swan depicts a moment in the story where a vampiric Tamara, based on Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and her painting Young Lady with Gloves (1930), is fighting a swan in the bathroom of Fini’s apartment. Several swans trapped for centuries within ice sculptures that double as bathroom fittings have broken free due to the rising temperature in the apartment, caused by the arrival of several winged poodles intent on saving the comic’s main character, Pauline, from the sapphic vampires.
