- Venue
- Paradise Projects, Leicester
- Location
- East Midlands
Sheets Still Orange From My Spray Tan:
Adam Gruning, Mike Jones, Jake Kent, Mathew Parkin
Paradise Projects, Leicester, 7th – 17th May 2015
Sheets Still Orange From My Spray Tan opened on the evening of May 7th, the same night as the general election. Politics loomed large that evening, in conversation and in the work of these four artists who probe the politics of the personal; of class, taste, commerce and capital – both cultural and monetary.
The exhibition title suggests a sickly intimacy; sticky, tacky (in both senses), a trash aesthetic. I doubt anyone here really has a spray tan, instead the title points to a culture of instant gratification, the blurb declaring: “I don’t want to be pale, I want to be successful!!” Elements throughout the show deal with the fetishisation and co-opting of lifestyle by a culture that values surface and image above all else, greatly facilitated by the Internet and the rise of social media. If popular culture throughout the second half of the 20th century was an ouroboros – a snake perpetually eating itself, popular culture after web 2.0 is the point at which the snake sheds its skin and eats that instead.
Mathew Parkin’s scattering of pieces entitled We livin it I’m just givin it to you real, baby c’mon (ft. Thomas Boland), 2015 includes a video of a snake in a pet shop, the stripes on its body shifting as it lifts its head, tracking a movement outside of its glass tank. The colours are gaudy, high contrast purples and pinks. On the wall behind is a neatly painted depiction of TinTin; he is wearing a mackintosh, Adidas joggers and New Balance trainers. He is reading from a sheet of paper and his face is bewildered, confused – maybe its a gallery press release, maybe its the email which has been printed out nearby, in which the sender outlines a new aspirational lifestyle. They want to be “WEARING LIKE ACNE STUDIO COATS AND HAVING INSTA PUMPS” and be “ABLE TO TALK ABOUT PHILOSOPHY IN A WAY THAT MY FELLOW WORKING CLASS PEOPLE GET WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT AND LIKE ME.”
All three of Jake Kent’s works use band patches, the kind worn on jackets and back pockets: here they are coated and moulded in splodges of Artex or Polyfilla. They are literally Crust-Punk – one is a Crass patch. I think of the recent controversy caused by H&M selling a jacket covered in patches for made up metal bands, targeting one of the few youth subcultures to have largely resisted co-option by the high street. Adam Gruning and Mike Jones’ works are a celebration of 90s kitsch; Michael Jordan trainers, bus seat fabric, screensavers, fluorescent slinkies – all find their place here. These nostalgic totems, alongside the Hardcore and Anarcho-Punk touched on by Kent have fallen within the scope of the so-called ‘Tumblr Aesthetic’, which propagates a kind of countercultural aspirational lifestyle, stripping the content away and leaving a trail of visually pleasing images – the ouroboros turns again.
