Hello Neighbours / Gusty Ferro

4 Oct-17 Nov 2024

PV 3 Oct 2024, 7-11pm

Overview

Hello Neighbours is a new installation by multi-disciplinary artist Gusty Ferro, their first solo presentation in London.

Working across sculpture, video, sound and drawing, Ferro’s practice is an ongoing spatial enquiry exploring the relationship between architecture, public space, and the body. Ferro considers their approach a form of personal cartography, one that centres the ‘anonymous other’ as an eyewitness to the shifting dynamics of control, negotiation, and desire that shape public space.

Ferro often employs gestural and intuitive making to create forms and images that are ambiguous and that can feel queered and uncanny in their mimicry of things that are familiar or unsettling. Informed directly by their own lived experience of urban space and its materiality, Ferro’s work has a distinctive aesthetic that draws readily on post-industrial and punk sensibilities.

The title Hello Neighbours infers a domestic subject, a resident or perhaps a voyeur, acknowledging or looking at others in their immediate environment, or someone being looked at and greeted. The ambiguous reading of the title mirrors the playful juxtaposition that Ferro has set up throughout the installation between seeing and being seen, visibility and obscurity, inside and outside.

Ferro has covered the doorway, walls and floor of the gallery with galvanised steel sheeting. Some of this material is drilled with small holes, reminiscent of material used to protect windows in empty housing, to prevent vandalism, and re-occupation. Ferro’s architectural intervention references the multiple homes boarded up in Thamesmead, an area that is currently undergoing redevelopment with significant changes to its communities.  

This perforated material allows light in, but obscures sight and entry. Behind the sheeting in the gallery, and in its blocked-up entrance, Ferro has placed prints of drawings and images, which are only visible by awkwardly peering through the holes to gain an intimate but partial view.

Central to the installation are two large linear sculptures combined with various elements including cobble stones, spiked chain used to delineate boundaries, and casts of detritus. Bent and twisted to create angular, gestural and animalistic forms, these sculptures are made from steel handrail, and covered in part with black PVC wrap, anti-climb paint, and cable ties. The materials used in these works are regularly used in the management of the public realm and encountered in everyday interventions by people negotiating and using public space.

In the past, Ferro has placed their sculptures within public spaces to sit in dialogue with an environment. The materiality and patina of these sculptural objects evidence Ferro’s regular reusing of materials, their cannibalising of sculpture and the previous social encounters they have experienced.  

Ferro has included paintings in the installation that echo the linear forms of the sculptures.  A single well worked painting on canvas loosely hung on the wall depicts an illustration of what could be organic forms with architectural elements or sculptures. Ferro has also painted directly on the wall and floor a sprawling black stencil made using lengths of spiked chain that could allude to smoke, burning or an insect swarm.

Against the shiny metal of the wall Ferro projects a video so that it is faint and obscured.  Night Shift (Lenses Estate, 2024) was made from mobile phone footage shot by Ferro as they walked and drifted around Thamesmead at night. The video shows a green-lit nighttime dreamscape. Within its image sequences, a fox sits then crosses the street, the contours of a brutalist staircase is perused, the moon looms into view, a brick wall hovers in front of the camera, we peer down dark subways and underpasses.  As the walk through the night progresses the camera is flared by street lights and the bright light from a fully burning parked car, flipping the shot footage back and forth between the representational and the abstract to produce a disorientating and seductive affect.

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An accompanying programme of events and published texts and broadcasts accompany the exhibition Hello Neighbours throughout its duration including a published and commissioned writing by Hesse K, experimental music performances by the Electronic Audio Club, M.E.L.T, and Subphonics, DIY radio workshops by the Shortwave Collective, and night of dub experiments by the Solidarity Sound System.

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Gusty Ferro has been living and working as an artist between Brazil and the UK since 2016. They graduated in BA Visual Arts at Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo in 2011 and participated the fine arts roaming programme School of the Damned (2019)Ferro has exhibited extensively across the UK, Latin America and Europe, Including at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, SWG3 Gallery, Abingdon Studios (Blackpool), Palmer Gallery (London), Manchester Contemporary, and Centro Cultural São Paulo.  Hello Neighbours at TACO! is their first solo project in London. Ferro will graduate from the Royal Academy Schools postgraduate programme in 2025.