We are proud to round off the year and welcome in the new one, with a brand new show by the turntable’s very own Darren Neave and Dale Christopher Wells. Their eclectic repurposing of found and neglected objects permeate throughout the exhibition, creating a collision between the wholesome and the loathsome.
Not Fit For Human Consumption - Darren Neave:
Visual depictions of scent either in film or artworks have always intrigued me, how smell and distinct reactions to it are perhaps heightened to create very obvious emotions - either pleasure or disgust. It is hard to discover the in between…
The power of scent and perhaps how it could be harnessed through association and assignation are important too, how people wear a signature scent or how a place can become synonymous with ambient smells maybe through a natural or industrial process.
I want to use this power to link the olfactory with art and in particular, sculpture. The 1990 advert for Fendi’s ‘La Passione di Roma’ shows a woman embracing a sculpture. Perfume has the power to bring us closer to art in very intimate ways.
Instagram: @thehazmatguy
SCHLECHTES FLEISCH - Dale Christopher Wells:
One of my most insidious, recurring nightmares is that an item becomes a near infinite repetition of itself. This ‘item’, replicates and replicates until the sheer quantity of the copies become impossible to comprehend. This is obviously an allusion to problems and obstacles becoming overwhelming. I don’t tend to analyse these things in such a way, but I’m quite certain.
During the implementation of Lock Down, resulting from the COVID pandemic, I suffered a resurgence of my bulimia, attributed to the reduction of my capacity to exercise in the way I could before the catastrophe. Each meal, with the exclusion of breakfast, I would purge, and follow up with habitual lapping of the house I then lived in. This repetition felt horrifically detached from the normal systems of existence, in much the same way as the endless cycle of horror in the news. In many respects, the wheel of external decay was mirrored in my own physical and mental decline.
Energy drinks masked the atrophy of nutritional deficiency, and the low calorie pickled foods, staved off the worst excesses of starvation. I was dying, I think, in a small way, of incremental privation. I was unable to run, nor climb, nor carry anything near approaching the weights I could, and now can. This repetition of self-harm is a clear reflection of those nightmares, albeit in a lucid way. In many ways, that overt display of habit is a universal one, and can quite readily be applied to needless hoarding, obsessive collecting, compulsive stimming, and a million other actions carried out my rote in order to navigate a difficult environment.
Rituals temper the stormier regions of our, or at least my, existence, but the traps against which they prove armour against are ever present. If by Sisyphean labour they might be de-barbed, then perhaps their needles might be blunted. I understand I will always carry the eating disorder with me, but it is less loud now than those horrible days of the pandemic.
Instagram: @dalechristopherwells
