The Same Room

Julie Becker, Casey Bolding, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, Emma Schwartz, Cal Siegel, Madeleine Ray Hines, Sara Yukiko Mon

Curated by Brunette Coleman, London

Before her death in 2016, Julie Becker’s life's work reflected the dilapidated rooms she lived in across Los Angeles. Through sculptural maquettes that resemble her numerous apartments, or as photographs of doll-houses, her series ‘The Same Room’ – which lends its title to this group show – depicts identically composed intersections of interiors. Varying in their decoration from one to the next, each room appears staged, their means of production unclear.

Writer Kirsty Bell wrote that ‘the interior in pragmatic terms is the vessel of experience’. The grouping of works in the exhibition all depict interiors and facades; glimpses into what we leave behind. In Julie Becker's and Sylvie Hayes-Wallace’s, the interiors are empty vessels seemingly devoid of human trace. Philosopher Georges Perec described the habitual aspects of everyday life as ‘infra-ordinary’ – encouraging us to examine our daily lives through various repetitive patterns. Both Becker and Hayes-Wallace recognise the structures which surround these experiences, favouring cool facades rather than the comforts of furniture and belongings. Conversely, in Emma Schwartz's and Casey Bolding’s paintings, there’s a sense of nostalgia, a bed for Schwartz and a chair in Bolding’s play the part of lead protagonists in their thickly ladened compositions.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes the home as ‘our corner of the world’. In Cal Seigel’s sculpture, a chunk of a door and stairwell look plucked from the cellar of a house. The addition of a theatrical stage light constitutes its placement at the centre of the gallery, Siegel’s calculated crop calling to mind the flash-lit intersections in Becker’s work. Both Madeleine Ray Hines and Sara Yukiko-Mon construct their pieces from imagery they source online, Ray Hines painting various Dior shop fronts, while Yukiko Mon’s collages of makeup palettes resemble dressing rooms.

Writer Sabrina Tarasoff noted that Becker ‘retrieved from domestic darkness the miracle of a bright imaginary’. Across the six artists who surround her at Shoot the Lobster, each undertakes a similar search for heightening their familiar thresholds, turning emptiness into a surfeit of potential.

—Ted Targett