The gallery is a civil smokescreen for the melancholy, the manic and the messy as the lines between human and animal blur.
Where All The Wild Things Are is an exhibition of work by four of this year’s London graduates: Katja Farin, Jacob Freeman, Michael Gao and Mia Wilkinson. The show looks at our space through strangeness with a sense of transgression as each artist lets us into their own world, or rather lets their world out.
Katja Farin paints vignettes, snippets of scenes playing out on each canvas. Reality and subconscious collapse and the daily mundane is distorted by imagination. While the figures are identifiably human, they bear no signifiers of gender and are defined by their unnatural skin tones and block colour backgrounds. Huge, hollow eyes stare out at the viewer, relating to us by means of longing looks. They appear tired, pursing their lips and gritting their teeth. Distortion of reality has condemned them to dysphoria as we see their eyes spiral. Farin’s works vary drastically in size, the smallest you could slip in your pocket, able to hide around the gallery and inviting us to seek them.
In the works of Michael Gao, we see his aesthetic intersection with the digital. Our eyes need adjust to the uncanny flatness of his paintings, achieved with an airbrush technique that likens their style to that of a video game. Confined to this semi-digital space, his subjects are canine, as he toys with the assumed status quo of the domestic space. Man’s best friend turns antagonist. In Rendezvous at the Garden, the dog appears plotting, its eyes out of frame, a conniving snarl forming. The human figure is carefully cropped, eyes elusive, as the power shifts and they are no longer the centre of interest. Gao reminds us of the wild things we allow, even invite, into our homes, and the assumed subservience we project onto them. His figures are hybrids, somewhere between human and animal.
This hybridity reappears in Mia Wilkinson’s work. If man’s best friends are dogs, she makes the case for cats in relation to women. The setting is domestic and the subjects naked, surrounded by familiar detritus. A carnivalesque role reversal occurs between the anthropomorphic animals that accompany these feral women as cats stand upright, fangs out and claws painted red. In the complimentary works CATSUIT and CATSUIT II, we see them literally chained together, posited as parallel beings. Wilkinson plays on the slang term ‘pussy’ as it relates to women and shows them as extensions of one another. Her ‘grotesqueries’ are brimming with energy, practically vibrating off the canvas.
Jacob Freeman paints a fantasy, with a focus on worldbuilding instead of people. Freeman’s subjects all exist within the same universe, his own. This approach gives way to a comprehensive collection of subjects, from cell to city, and his use of colour covers the spectrum from white, through neon, to black. There is a contagious, joyful energy coming from frogstack or Ricky as their mouths hang open in awe or excitement. Tongue-in-cheek titles suggest an already underlying narrative thread linking each work. These creatures act as observers with their eyes clear and bright, looking out from the back of the gallery across every other work and waiting to greet those who enter.
Where All The Wild Things Are is a gathering of visions, a conversation and an exploration of how four different artists contain their 'wild things' in their work. Allow your eyes roam up and down the walls, holding the gaze of each encounter snarling, wide-eyed, spiralling or absent.
