Another week, another Five Art Things thing, on we go and never mind the bliss or the selfies in front of the art or whatever we said last time. Five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now (or any moment now). Five art shows to check out in the coming days as we repeat ourselves. We do aim to make this an (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events, five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”. This Five Things thing is simply a regular list of five or so recommended art things happening now or coming up very soon that we think you might find as interesting as we think we will…
And we should add, that entry to these recommended exhibitions and events, unless otherwise stated, is free
1: Rita Says, Trace Evidence at Hundred Years Gallery – 22nd May to 1st June 2025 – Trace Evidence is an exhibition of 12 new drawings, 1 film and 2 new live performances, the show is a continuing exploration of the relation between live art, documentation and drawing. Rita Says is a London based artist who works with film, live art, drawing and sculpture. Since 2008 she has been the director of Rita Says and The Jerico Orchestra. You might have caught some of her work via the Cultivate online exhibitions recently. The recent film of the performance piece Tell Me What You Want (made at Hundred Years Gallery back in March) will be shown on the opening night, plus Eclipse One and Eclipse Two (Performance) will be presented during the run of the exhibition.
Program:
Thursday May 22, Opening night : Tell Me What You Want shown in the basement space at 8pm.
Saturday May 24 from 4:30 to 5:30: Eclipse One (Performance).
Saturday May 31 from 4:30 to 5:30: Eclipse Two (Performance)
Hundred Years is found at 3 Pearson Street, London, E2 8JD. The space is open Wednesday to Sunday, 2pm to 6pm.
2: Toby Rainbird, Do Nothing at Canal Boat Contemporary, Victoria Park, East London – “Our second featured artist in the box will be Toby Rainbird, who will present Do Nothing – a solo showcase of three paintings. We’re huge fans of Toby’s work, which we first encountered when he was one of the participating artists in the Canal Boat Art Fair – the project that gave birth to Canal Boat Contemporary. Since then, Toby has gone on to study Painting at the Royal College of Art, where he won the university’s prestigious Hine Prize. He is now the Freelands Fellow at the University of Brighton. His paintings have gone from strength to strength. They occupy a space of their own – hovering somewhere between geometric colour fields and the suggestion of representation. We love the tension Toby creates with his tonal chords, offset by zinging, discordant key tones. They really are like watching music.
Of course being a Canal Boat, the gallery moves around, from 21st till 27th May 2025 it looks like they can be found between the Cambridge Heath bridge and the lock adjacent to Victoria Park. The art is housed in a box on the side of the boat alongside the path, so open 24/7. Watch this space, more later… And there it is, on the toepath, a #43SecondFilm…
3: Best Self, curated by Polly Morgan at Brooke Benington – 23rd May until 28th June 2025, Featuring Juno Calypso, Mat Collishaw, Polly Morgan, Christopher Page, Boo Saville, Julia Thompson and Bengt Tibert, and well, I could be wrong, I could be right, it could be good? It kind of looks like it might be? ‘Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.’ Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
“How many selves do we have and would friendship blossom if they met? Perhaps Best Self would admire the bravery of Make-up-free Self and praise her ‘courage’? Lurking Self might compliment Public Self for ‘putting it out there’ as Masochist Self basks in the heat of Hot Self’s disdain. Fiction thinks estrangement is a more likely outcome. Young Self Dorian Gray stabs the portrait of Aged Self and takes his own life in the process. Best Self Sue in The Substance is repulsed by Worst Self Elisabeth’s binge-eating and keeps her locked in a cupboard.
The more abundantly we possess wealth, youth and beauty the more we seek to elude death.The pursuit of eternal life, or Transhumanism, is funded by billionaires with too much to relinquish to consider an end. The wellness and beauty industry are the new granters of indulgences. Using terms like ‘longevity protocol’ and ‘anti-aging’ they promise an escape from the hell of senescence if we only grease their baby-soft palms.
Julia Thompson’s glowing coloured bottles have all the allure of these products sold to us as elixirs of youth, yet in reality they are tainted distillations of femininity. Formed from make-up, soap, sugar, perfume and vodka, the scent of candy and florals is overpowered by ethanol. Having emerged from their moulds like perfect little dolls, their shifts in translucence and colour reveal the incompatibility of the materials within and in time outside influences take their toll and they grow wonky, leaky and stooped.
Society expects women to resist and repair changes to their appearance as they age, with scant regard to the personal cost. Boo Saville’s painting Emerge (Quarantine) captures a female face, presumably just freed from the pandemic duty to wear a surgical mask, concealed this time behind a cleansing peel. Is this ‘self care’ or pressure to rejuvenate her skin for the eyes of others? Queen Elizabeth I suffered dermatological damage from the lead present in her pale foundation. Presumably this will have compelled her to apply further layers, thus worsening the scarring she sought to disguise. We can’t know what Queen Elizabeth I would have felt on seeing Mat Collishaw’s Mask of Youth, a Robotic silicone mask modelled with special effects to approximate her true, pock marked and pomp-free appearance, but seeing how she chose to be memorialised in the Armada Portrait we can assume this is a self she wouldn’t have wanted to outlive her.
Bengt Tibert’s magisterial women, clad in neon lycra, are created using AI and thus free of the limitations of mortality. Dazzling in dramatic natural settings, they might be the heroic survivors of natural disasters or pastiches of gymwear-clad women indulging in a ‘Selfiesta’ of posterior displays and conspicuous styling, like Birds of Paradise dancing whilst the world burns. Five cement tablets cast from the inside of the latest iPhone box group and overlap like a pocket sized cemetery, in Here Lies Our World by Polly Morgan. Buried at the back in a sunny orange, a coloured cast snake is nestled in the camera lens cavity. Successive iterations of the same snake adjust their tone a shade in fresh attempts to thrive, as might a maladaptive breed or a selfie that fails to muster sufficient likes. Accumulating like notifications they nudge closer to the viewer as though soliciting selection, before they are bested by a better self.
With the invention of the front facing camera, smartphones added the mirror to their arsenal of applications. As if from a fairy tale, this looking glass offers us what we want to see, rather than what is there. Christopher Page’s That Which Is Missing is a painting on canvas of an analogue mirror. The curve of a frame and the way light appears to reflect on bevelled glass fool us into believing that one thing is another. Like a smartphone, it’s a compelling illusion; when we draw close to peer into it, we disappear.
Juno Calypso’s Silent Retreat depicts a young woman in a pool fragmented by five mirrors. Despite the multiple perspectives offered, nothing of her is revealed. The mask she wears for some uncertain beauty treatment has a shiny white surface and black holes for eyes, giving her the blank appearance of a hollow china doll; an allegory perhaps for photo-sharing platforms, where the most prolific give the least away. Social media’s increasingly sophisticated editing tools have democratised the opportunity to control our image, even as we slacken in the attic. From Queen to Kween we may now fashion our immortal face, as what will remain when our mirrors hang vacant”.
Brooke Benington is found at 76 Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 6NB. The show runs from 23rd May until 28th June 2025, open Wednesday until Saturday, Midday until 6pm, (5pm on Saturdays). With an opening on 23rd May, 6 until 8pm.
4: Lily Holder and Luisa Maria MacCormack, Bad Genetics at Safehouse 1 and 2, Peckham – 23rd May until 26th May 2025 – What’s going on? Well; “Slug Tits and Rubber Girls; flayed, proliferating latex bodies dangling from the ceiling fixtures, genetically modified breasts that slither off into the darkness and suppurate under the flowerpots” so we’re told
“Lily Holder and Luisa Maria MacCormack are proud to present Bad Genetics; a collection of Photography, Ceramics and Installations at Safehouse Peckham. Lily Holder presents her ‘Rubber Girls’. Lovingly deconstructed, disinfected and polished up by their loyal caretaker; the rubber girls never grow, never age and never leave. Unless the light gets in. Armed with a bottle of latex shine and a rotary cutter, Holder aims to keep her girls safe and at home at all costs. Working with materials that mimic skin, Holder’s works consider how the bodily presence of a work of art invites a sense of caretaking, a reciprocal and elongated creation process demanded by the innate bodily qualities of the material itself. Working with latex as a living, evolving organic material, the works in turn invite broader questions about the ethics of care around changing and evolving bodies.
Luisa Maria MacCormack’s ‘Slug Tits’ explore the fractured and increasingly contested space between the genetically human and the genetically modified, ‘extra’ human. Inhabiting an imagined world where quantum leaps in genetic coding technologies allow us to splice away our bad genetics; replacing them with borrowed genomes, stolen evolutionary traits.
This exhibition explores a radical method of resistance in this imagined (perhaps not-so-distant) world of genetic mutant perfection; [genetically modified] breasts, resist the onslaught of male gaze simply by slithering away, leaving a trail of ooze in their wake. Freed from the constraints of body, liberated from the watchful jurisdiction of a custodian, these works imagine what the private life of a slug-tit might hold. What ecstasies, what horrors, the secret life of the genetic mutant, half woman, half slug.
Safehouse 1 is at139 Copeland Road, Safehouse 2 is next door, Peckham, London, SE15 3SN. There’s an opening on Friday 23rd May 6 until 8pm and then the space is open Saturday, Sunday and Monday 24th, 25th and 36th, 10am until 6pm (3pm on the Monday)
5: Slipping the Veil at St Bartholomew the Great – “A contemporary art exhibition presented within Great St Barts Church, the oldest church in London and an integral part of the City’s historic fabric” – 27th May until 14th June 2025
“Curator and artist in residence Elena Unger and curator and gallerist James Freeman will bring together over twelve artists in London’s oldest church for a contemporary art exhibition: Slipping the Veil. The show includes reconfigured relics by Jack Evans, immersive sound and words from Nick Cave and visual installations from an international group of artists, including painters Piper Bangs, Elena Unger, Ben Jamie and textile painter Anne von Freyburg. Large-scale installations by Diana Orving, Juliette Losq, Edgar Ward, and Kate McDonnell make monumental interventions into the space, along with sculptural interventions from Carolein Smit and Claire Curneen.
For over 900 years, Saint Bartholomew the Great has been a centre for liturgy and ritual, a space whose central purpose is bringing visitors into contact with the ineffable. It is said that within St Barts, the boundaries of time and space become that little bit thinner. Slipping the Veil presents an exhibition of artworks that perform the same function: to lift our experience beyond the earthly every day, to slip the veil of banality, and to make contact with experiences that reach beyond ourselves.
Each piece in the exhibition responds to the church’s fragmented history, creating new dialogues that evoke both continuity and transformation. The exhibition draws on the Gothic tradition, returning to a fascination with spaces where the known meets the unknown. In this space, art and architecture are not static but alive with possibility, offering a glimpse beyond time and materiality. Slipping the Veil is an invitation to encounter the sublime, where the ordinary fades and something timeless emerges”.
St Bartholomew the Great is at W Smithfield, Barbican, London EC1A 9DS. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am until 5pm, 8.30am to 6pm on Sundays. The show funs from 27th May until 14th June 2025, there is also an opening on 27th, 6.30pm until 10pm.
Previously…
8th May 2025 – ORGAN: Five Recommended Art Shows – The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, Richard Pendry at Atom Gallery, Evangeline Armstrong and Diana Olifirova at Bomb Factory, Shoreditch, Jonathan Lasker at Timothy Taylor, Pinkie Maclure and Medieval Eyes at James Freeman Gallery and…
THE ORGAN 