EPISODE 6: Vacant Possession
Saturday 26th August: 10:00 - 16:00
Basement Residency: Rachel Parry
Throughout August, Nottingham based artist Rachel Parry has been using our Basement to examine their neuro-queer lived experience through the complex edges of autobiographical trauma, survival, disability, gender and class.
Rachel's practice has been rooted in body-based Live Art with combined Interdisciplinary and Inter-media outputs examining an ongoing art/life blur. Exhibiting inter/nationally in non/traditional and hijacked site-specific spaces.
Currently focusing on “Malfunctioning Perfectly”; their ongoing research around ‘liveness’ includes how/if we can embed our presence/embodied practices inside emergent technology.
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Ground Floor: End of Tenancy group exhibition from OTOKA studio artists & guests:
Lynn Fulton, Grime, Candice Jacobs, Simon Raven, Leomi Sadler, Aaron Williamson
Lynn Fulton uses uncertain processes, unpredictability and our understanding of objects, surfaces and materials to explore sculpture’s ability to exist and be seen, folded or opened.
Lynn has most recently been awarded an Abby fellowship at the British school at Rome 2023/24 and will be exhibiting new work in one of OTOKA’s large window vitrines.
Grime focuses on the reinterpretation of working class and magical histories, posing questions around the hierarchies that exist within social structures and how the queer body sits within (or against) them. Drawing upon a personal symbology and their own experiences with homelessness and alienation within upper class institutions, they create works in a range of materials including drawings, sculptures and performances.
For OTOKA, Grime has created a series of pieces around the idea of Debt and it’s place in society as a system of control. The work was made as a cathartic response to their recent experience with a bailiff threat and the impact debt can have on everyday peoples lives.
Candice Jacobs addresses the futile attempts we make to escape from capitalist realities to explore the residual and habitual notions of effect linked to our attachment to the internet; and how these moments require us to constantly reflect and revalidate our sense of Self.
Candice will be showing “Extracting the Earth for all it’s worth and replacing it with nothing but a controlled form of hallucination”, a new 3 screen video work that utilises images from the Hubble Space Telescope, 90s screensaver technology and script that explores the meta-physical realities of motherhood.
IMAGE CREDIT: Candice Jacobs, Extracting the Earth for all it’s worth and replacing it with nothing but a controlled form of hallucination, 2023
Simon Raven makes disability-identified artworks and events and is currently developing new works in response to the historic use of vacant commercial spaces by artists. He is also creating ‘critical music' in collaboration with James Brouwer and has recently performed at Riga International Performance Festival.
Simon will be exhibiting “Oversharing with Jesus”, 2020, 13 cartoon drawings made during Lockdown, drawing from PhD research into disability arts and lived experience of bipolar disorder. He will also be performing several new works throughout the day.
Leomi Sadler’s artistic tendrils combine emotionally burdened imagery with comic book aesthetics to playfully warp neo-liberal power dynamics, contemporary cruelty and public humiliation.
We have decided to leave some of the posters up in the OTOKA windows that Leomi created with the Stytch EnBytch collective for our contribution to Nottingham Pride.
Aaron Williamson is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised, yet humorous sensibility towards disability.
As OTOKA moves on to it's next location, taking advantage of failing capitalist systems and corporate businesses going bust, Aaron will bring a line of ‘phantom bow/omen’ to the front doors of the gallery to shoot rubber arrows over the heads of passing shoppers.
IMAGE CREDIT: Simon Raven, Oversharing with Jesus, 2020
