A Record of Temporary Conviction

Violet Dennison, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Oshay Green, Kristian Kragelund, Armando Nin, Kayode Ojo

In A Record of Temporary Conviction, an unexpected arrangement of sculptures, assemblages, paintings and painting- adjacent works by Violet Dennison, Daniel Dewar & Gregory Gicquel, Oshay Green, Kristian Kragelund, Armando Nin and Kayode Ojo is characterized by questions of proximity and transformation

In two new oil, acrylic and ultra-matte vinyl emulsion paintings on linen, Violet Dennison expands her Jacob’s Ladder Flower series — abstracted depictions of the bell-shaped flower with ladder-shaped leaves named after the Biblical story in which Jacob dreams of a ladder connecting heaven and earth. Based off digital collages of the surfaces of previous paintings and rendered using her standard repertoire of brushstrokes (which includes a significant number of non-brush tools, such as squeegees, palette knives, and rags), Dennison’s mutated Jacob’s Ladder Flower paintings comprise stenciled layers of metallic and blush tones.

Contrasting the subtleties of Dennison’s practice, two works by the materially-obsessed duo Dewar and Gicquel — a Neo-Dada stoneware sculpture with smokeable “pipe-tiles,” and a trompe l’oeil, oversized merino wool Aran sweater — offer an ironic take on the sense of “material humor” shared among the artists, all of whom are intimately concerned with the properties and procedures of material transformation.

In Oshay Green’s unpronounceable assemblage — Y- -M2-3- - (2024) — acts of construction become indistinguishable from acts of deconstruction. Having entered Green’s studio in the form of a second-hand sofa, being taken apart, and then, using its own suede, mesh, wood, staples and nails, being reformed into a bowing sphinx or centaur-like creature, Y- -M2-3- - resists easy categorization as a sculptural, assemblage or readymade work. Crucially, Y- -M2-3- - reflects the fleeting, time-based sentiments held by the exhibition’s title.

Compared to Green’s gestational imposition, Kristian Kragelund’s silver-infused-thread embroideries on framed linen canvases embody a vastly different sense of objecthood, yet exist in service to similar discourses on dynamics of production and consumption. By appropriating illustrations from Flora Londinensis (1777) — a 6-volume folio of flowers found around Imperial London which, it turned out, had all been all “imported” and wrongly identified — Kragelund performs a critical examination of the ways value and power can be asserted through subliminal and banal acts of beauty and violence

The so-called “paintings” of Armando Nin are made using the soot from lit candles to “draw” onto canvases suspended overhead. Adapting the Renaissance-era concept of giornata (meaning “a day’s work and originally associated with time-sensitive fresco painting), each of Nin’s works exists as a unique record of the path of his hand and embodies the precision and unpredictability of working with fire.

Recalling recurrent themes of consumerism and aspiration, Kayode Ojo’s assemblages of faux-riche-to-riche readymades consider a metaphysical kind of transformation — from commodity to art-objects. By recontextualizing a range of mass-produced goods (the components of the work His Dark Materials (Virginia Black) (2025) include a Charles-Hubert wristwatch and a bottle of Drake- brand whiskey) Ojo effects symbolic transformation of material.

By manufacturing recognition, Dennison, Dewar & Gicquel, Green, Kragelund, Nin and Ojo set off its associated politics and pleasures.