Episode 3: All that is fluid melts into air
PV 9th March
10 - 26 March 2023
Open: Fri - Sat 12-8pm Sun 12-4pm
OTOKA takeover of Broadway Gallery, Nottingham
Liquidity. Free falling until caught by cyclones of time & space. Like my mothers hand, your mothers and us, as mothers, ready to catch you if you fall. Yet, we are falling, again and again, into the synapses of our minds which slap us round the face just when we didn't realise we needed a wake up call. A reality cheque. Fascias convince us that we’re the only ones who really know ourselves. But who are we that appear to others as coded rhythms. Expanding bodies breed those who come after those who came before us, filled with oceans of new beginnings, unknowing of the knowledge still yet to surface, swallowed by implications of the truth into the present, the past and the future. Don't worry, perhaps our touch will comfort in the knowledge of the nothingness as yet unresolved. Trust me, it's not just us… images are also causing an environmental crisis. They need all the energy that we can muster because they are the visual representation of all the worlds vitality. What has changed is not the dimensionality of the future, but its predictability. The other, the ether, the mother… safely and securely letting go of our anxieties and worry. I care but I am careless.
Jacobs explores a world that exists as a mode of interrogation, drawing attention to aspects of reality that require further review and consideration, seizing and documenting behaviours that participate in spatial disturbances.
Her works involve the manipulation of symbols (which are also things) and people (who are also symbolic), archetypes that supply a vocabulary for a process of events and private epiphanies which act as a platform for social and self-reflection.
She’s interested in the relationship between spiritual capitalism and ethics under neoliberalism; the idiosyncratic relationship that these behaviours have with the development of technology; their connection to post‐truth conspiracies and belief; their associations with luxury and privilege that exploit and manipulate the environment and the communities from which their elements originated; and their relationship to identity politics.
Jacobs creates both on and offline works that combine digital technologies with Amethyst crystals made from discarded tax returns; pyramid chill out zones made from UV steel and dry ice; 3d printed sculptures of gold plated Fortuna cigarettes; symbolic neon light sculptures and white quartz sand fire pits; and Rorschach paintings made from discarded make up.
She was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2022 and her works have been shown in exhibitions, art fairs & institutions across the globe including the the 56th Venice Biennale; FACT Liverpool; Wysing Arts Centre; Nottingham Contemporary; Camden Arts Centre; Pane Project & Like A Little Disaster for Manifesta, France; Artnight 2020, London; VITRINE; Seventeen Gallery; Focal Point Gallery; Auto Italia South East; DKUK; Five Years; Project Number; Cactus; Studio Voltaire; Near Now; The Material Art Fair Mexico; Manchester Contemporary; The Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology Bangalore; The Eternal Internet Brother & Sisterhood Sri Lanka & Documenta 14; Standpoint Futures; The Arts Foundation; Emergency 6; Outpost; Vice Creative 30; Future 50 and The Celeste Art Prize.
All that is fluid melts into air acts as a new solo exhibition by Candice Jacobs and forms Episode 3 of OTOKA's takeover of Broadway Gallery in Nottingham.
The title of the exhibition comments on the book “All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity” by Marshall Berman who interprets modernisation through processes of dreaming, loving and developing, which connects to the vision of this new exhibition by Candice Jacobs. Much like Berman, Jacobs also uses text & poetry to analyse the self-destructive nature of modernisation.
Arriving at a neural crystalline structure heavy with the burden of our worries, shining with hints of neon & glistening pools of screens that move around to track & trace the bodies & words that flow through dying exotic waters 'All that is fluid melts into air' expands on new understandings of the body through motherhood & how this connects to ideas of fluidity, liquidity & stability; the economy, the climate & the internet.
Together with community groups of women from around the city, we have built a paper mache crystalline sculpture made of discarded tax returns and as much recycled paper we could muster connected to the economy… we have embedded our thoughts and set affirmations to let go of our anxieties by placing them directly into the sculpture so that it (instead of us) can carry the burden of our shared realities and swallow the stress, even if it's just for a split second in time.
Our conversations have been re-written & transformed into a poetic form of text that now sits within a collection of video & VR works that have been integrated into the sculpture.
Candice Jacobs is collaborating with Framework for Practice who have supported the construction of the sculpture in the gallery. Framework for Practice is a project that uses scaffolding as a display strategy for creative and cultural activity. They re-use the display components, and use found materials, to minimise the environmental impact of their activities.
This new work expands out from an interview Candice Jacobs had with Tess McClure, former editor of VICE New Zealand and journalist of “Dark Crystals, the brutal reality of the wellness craze” printed in the Guardian newspaper in 2019, which you can listen to as a podcast on www.thewellnessformula.guru - a website hosting Jacobs’ most recent solo show that took placeI during lock-down at Five Years Gallery in London.
