ART-PREVIEW: Lonesome Wife

The group exhibition “Lonesome Wife” takes its title from the book “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife” (first published in 1968 and republished in 1989) by the experimental American novelist William H. Gass. The book is narrated through the voice of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title. Disappointed by her inattentive husband, she engages in a breezy display of the varieties and visual qualities of language – diverse typefaces, speech bubbles, typographical experiments, in order to seduce a clandestine new lover, who is slowly revealed through the book as the Reader themself.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Seventeen Gallery Archive

Using text as a starting point, Gass creates a parallel between a concrete use of language and the female body of Babs Masters, both employed as tools of persuasion, absorbing the reader-viewer in a game of intimate eclipse and revelation. “Lonesome Wife” looks at the multiple ways in which seduction can serve as narrative tool as well as an antidote to boredom and disinterest. The exhibited works hint at the body, the physicality of text and the linguistic capacity of objects; moving between the registers of form, process and content, to be read or to be felt. Victoria Adam is interested in materials, forms and products that are modest and often overlooked. Collecting, copying and remaking approximations of shells, coins, air fresheners, compost, fridge magnets and fossils, Adam draws attention through her astute formal compositions to the things that we brush up against every day. Her sculptural vignettes embody numerous tensions; between the specific and the generic, the clean and the grubby, and the elegant and the raw. Luis Miguel Bendaña knits “Blush On A Man” in a layer of polyester threads, examining the schizophrenic and mindless cycle of our “Collective trauma”. Knitting is chosen because it is so elastic, so “Soft and painful” and because “It is so absorbent of memory”.  These bits of string are then adorned with paper clippings, a kind of knitted tableau. Participating artists: Victoria Adam, Adriano Amaral, Noah Barker, Luis Miguel Bendaña, Patrizio di Massimo, Justin Fitzpatrick, Lisa Holzer, Isaac Lythgoe and Vanessa Safavi.

Info: Organizer: Attilia Fattori & Franchini, Seventeen Gallery, 270-276 Kingsland Road, London, Duration: 30/9-5/11/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-1:00, www.seventeengallery.com