Hello Neighbours / Gusty Ferro

4 Oct-17 Nov 2024

PV 3 Oct 2024, 7-11pm

Overview

Hello Neighbours, an exhibition of new work by multi-disciplinary artist Gusty Ferro. Working across sculpture, video, sound and drawing, Ferro’s practice is an ongoing sculptural enquiry into the relationship between architecture, public space, and the body.  Ferro considers their practice as a form of personal cartography, one that centres the ‘other’ as eyewitness to the shifting dynamics of control, negotiation, and desire that make up the fabric of urban space. Hello Neighbours is Ferro’s first solo exhibition in London.

In their making of artworks Ferro often employs gestural and intuitive making to create spaces, forms and images that are queered, uncomfortable and uncanny. Informed directly by their own lived experience of urban space and its materiality, Ferro’s work has a distinctive aesthetic that draws on post industrial, techno and punk sensibilities.

Within Hello Neighbours, Ferro covers the gallery walls and floor with galvanised steel sheeting. Cut with small holes and gestural apertures, this sheeting is formally reminiscent off material used to protect windows in empty housing and prevent re-occupation. Ferro’s architectural intervention references the multiple homes boarded up in Thamesmead, an area of SE London where TACO! is situated that is currently undergoing redevelopment and significant changes to the demography of its communities.

Central to the exhibition are two large sculptures made from linear steel piping, bent and twisted to create sharp, angular gestural forms drawn in space. These sculptures are made from steel handrail, covered in part with black PVC wrap, anti climb paint, and black cable ties. These materials are used in the management of the public realm and encountered in the everyday interventions made by people negotiating and using space. Ferro has in the past placed their sculptures within public spaces to sit in dialogue with an environment. The materiality and patina of these sculptural objects evidences Ferro’s regular reusing of material, their cannibalising of sculpture, and their previous encounters.

Upon the boarded up gallery walls Ferro presents a series of large scale abstract wall based works that echo the linear forms of the sculptures. Ferro combines hand drawn gestural forms with stencilled outlines of lengths of spiked chain, an architectural material used to delineate boundaries of spaces from carparks to gardens. These drawings are executed In Ferro’s signature black and purple pastel palette, giving these works a distinct punk aesthetic and tone.

Ferro interprets these drawn works as maps, or musical scores, and over the duration of the exhibition will translate their gestural language into expansive electronic soundscapes and an experimental performance in collaboration with invited musical collectives Electronic Audio Club, M.E.L.T, and Superphonics.

Also presented is a recent video work made by Ferro on his many walks and drifts around Thamesmead. Titled Night Shift (Lenses Estate), the work has been made from footage shot by the artist as they walk around Thamesmead at night, ands shows foxes crossing streets, the contours of brutalist architecture, and dark subways and underpasses. The green glow of the night camera Ferro uses is flared by streets lights and the light from a fully burning car, flipping the video between the representational and the painterly 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: published pamphlets with texts by Laura Grace Ford and Hesse K, experimental music performances by the Electronic Audio Club, M.E.L.T, and Superphonics, and DIY radio workshops by the Shortwave Collective.

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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 have 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 Galeria Pilar (Sao Paulo) Hello Neighbours at TACO! is their first solo project in London. Ferro will graduate from the Royal Academy Schools postgraduate programme in 2025.