Here There Be Monsters at Peckham Safehouse, London SE15, June 2024 – It goes on, there’s always always another art show waiting, demanding, I have no real idea how may galleries we’ve been inside this week, a couple of dozen maybe? Navigating territories of non-knowing indeed. Thursday night and Peckham, land of the Mighty Pound and a thousand nail bars is calling again. Well first call Peckham, there are other places to be after Peckham has been pecked at, start South, head back East, we can just about be in two places at once.  

“Navigating territories of non-knowing” is what we’re told we’re doing here tonight or maybe that’s what the five artists in this exhibition are doing as they combine and “seek to redefine our understanding of limits and extol the possibility of arriving elsewhere”. I don’t know about that rather bold statement, I can tell you this is an excellently curated exhibition, a rather rewarding show, a dynamic show that bites in just the right manner. Five artists talking to each other in a very engaging way through the holes in the floors and the fallen down walls of Peckham’s Safehouse. The exhibition features the work of Sarah Barker Brown, Benedict Johnson, Jolene Liam, Gill Roth and Kika Sroka-Miller and the only real problem here is the dust from the fallen plaster and the faltering brickwork that’s being kicked up by the crowd the show has attracted, this is not a contact-lens friendly venue when things are dry and busy. Do like Safehouse though, do like all the holes and the marks and the stories the walls hint at, not sure how much longer the two Safehouses (that stand next to each other) are going to last, surely it is only a matter of time before they fall down? For now, when the curation is as right as it is tonight they remain great places to explore art

Here There Be Monsters is a well considered group show, not to well considered though, there is an attitude here, an edge as well as a depth. It was the need to see the paintings of Kika Sroka-Miller in real life that fuelled the desire to jump on a train from East London, those paintings of hers have looked strong on line, they looked good in the recent Mixtape No.7 show, they needed to be seen in real life though. We all know there is no substitute, we need to appreciate the scape, the texture, the movement of the paint, the colour, we need to get a proper sense of it all, not just an online hint via a computer screen. Those already familiar Kika Sroka-Miller paintings live up to the promise, there they are in the middle of a strong show that claims to be drawing inspiration from the concept of the brink – “that unnerving zone on the periphery of our awareness”  and yes, this collection of work does indeed “invite viewers to contemplate the inevitable slippage between boundaries that define fixed notions of object, space and body” – and no that it for once not obscure art talk, that is the actually invitation extended here. Yes, there is an uncertainly and not just the slightly annoying uncertainty of who has painted what – yes there is a complex diagram if you have time to work it all out while your phone is in one hand and your beer is in the other, oh for a simple label! I’d love to meet the person who first decided it was uncool to put a simple unobtrusive label under a painting, especially in a messy space like this where the walls themselves are covered in marks and more. Actually I rather like the uncertainly of it all. 

So anyway, slight label rant and the fact that I’m still not one hundred percent sure who’s was what now, apart from that and the questioning of where one realm ends and another begins, there is something in the way the five artists have approached the act of painting with “a deliberate embracing of uncertainty”. And yes they do kind of play on the border between artwork and artist, paint and painter and indeed to grasp something of the ever-changing interplay of forces that shape our understanding of wholeness, territory and autonomy. But then as William once said, what are words worth? and to (almost) borrow some more from the show statement, there is interplay, engagement, there are questions fired at the viewer, fired by the paintings themselves though, not the statements made on paper or the rules that need to be broken or indeed the broken walls and the missing floorboards. 

Hey look, a lot of the time in a group show you maybe find one or two artists who really engage, you come away happy with the one artist that really said something, you politely leave the rest and try and not take shots at the whole thing, here in Here There Be Monsters it really is all rather good. Maybe it lies in the conversations between the paintings or the artists? Maybe it is the almost fragile impermanence of the environment that is bringing something out? Maybe it is the whole thing as one experience? Whatever it is, this is a strong show and we need to get these words up while you still have time to get there rather then mess around trying to once more dance around the architecture of it all and only tell you after the show has closed. Great exhibition, great work, great curation, go see it if you can, you’ll be pleased to did. As we’ve said before on these pages, art excites…  (sw)     

The exhibition features the work of Sarah Barker Brown, Benedict Johnson, Jolene Liam, Gill Roth, and Kika Sroka-Miller and The gloriously distressed Peckham Safehouse is found at 137 Copeland Road, Peckham, London SE15 3SN. The show runs until Sunday 30th June, the space is open midday until 6pm each day.  

As always, do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show