Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Cecile Johnson Soliz, David Kefford, Sandra Lane, Eugene Macki, Kate McLeod, Donna Mitchell, John Plowman, Irina Razumovskaya, Si Sapsford, Erika Trotzig.
Antimonumental is an exhibition of new and recent sculptures made by eleven artists living and working across the UK that engages with notions of fallibility, precarity and ephemerality in our time of global climate catastrophe.
Antimonumental takes cues from the 2008 exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New Museum, New York) that focused on a specific form of contemporary sculpture that ‘displayed a distinct informality: conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted, they are un- heroic and manifestly unmonumental’. Sixteen years later this attitude towards materiality and making sculpture seems even more critical in a time of economic precarity and environmental uncertainty.
Antimonumental showcases a range of artistic practices operating within a sculptural framework that question diverse subjects and pertinent themes including contested statues, colonialism, migration, junk space, domestic violence, politics of memory, becoming other, structures of power, post-human futures, ambivalence and much between.
Visitors to the exhibition can expect to experience a dynamic exhibition of sculpture including site-specific works, made during a short residency period, that engage directly with the unique architecture of the spacious gallery. On site constructions will include Erika Trotzig’s teetering structures of foam and wood, Cecile Johnson Soliz’s twisted newsprint composition moving across the wall, Donna Mitchell’s improvised construction that relocates materials collected at a tin mine waste dump into Thames-Side Studios Gallery.
As a newly formed collective assembled by artist Kate McLeod, a critical conversation is emerging between these antimonumental artists who find a shared voice and attitude in producing and presenting sculptures that rejoice in mutability, modularity, awkward relationships, ready-mades, absurdity, futility, failure, gesture, reclaiming, re-appropriating, reusing, repurposing, wobbly eruptions, things cobbled together, erasure.
All the sculptures presented in Antimonumental embody notions of fallibility, yet however tremulous these objects appear on the surface they also belie a resilience and resistance that demand a reinvestment and investigation into objects that already exist in the world today.
