For his first London solo exhibition with Copperfield titled Kitchen Sink Drama, Ty Locke has taken over the gallery’s back office and kitchenette, working with the walls, surfaces, sink and cupboards. Locke’s works often deal with domestic breakdown, reflecting on his own childhood as one of 7 siblings growing up in working class Kent with a good helping of bad luck. Entering the office and kitchenette area into the exhibition, visitors will push their way through Same Shit Diff Day, a bead curtain executed in strung together self-roll cigarette filters.
Lifting the text "Same shit diff day" from an entry scrawled across 2 empty pages of his mum’s diary Locke found while she was in prison, he subtly unloads his dark humor across the objects that make up the room. Mirrors are inscribed with positive little marks like smiling suns and wiggles, while the cryptic ID tag number carved into the corner is the only reference to the origin of these marks found in the margins of his mums’ letters sent to him from HMP Bronzefield.
Other works are preoccupied with transforming useful domestic objects, rendering them useless in the conventional sense through processes which are incredibly labour intensive and tragicomic. The masochistic processes involved in filling all holes in a colander with circles of plastic removed from a nearby kettle, meticulously fabricating net curtains from hundreds of Rizla Papers, or welding a ladder into a circle, become a sort of therapy for Locke.
Talking about dysfunction by causing dysfunction.
