Jennifer Bailey at David Dale Gallery
Jennifer Bailey’s subdued exhibition “Small Room” conveys the on a regular basis solitude of artwork observe. Pictures of Tupperware pasta, cash, and mundane studio objects communicate to home penny-pinching and part-time gigs. The room is dominated by 4 giant and imposingly clean stretches of polyester fleece that just about resemble mattress protectors. Mounted on the adjoining partitions, two scale fashions recall to mind miniature high-street store fronts. Renfrew Avenue, 2013/2022, homes some soiled glasses, whereas Artwork Room, 2001/2022, comprises a plastic bag with two oranges, which each seem surreally oversize, like the enormous apple in René Magritte’s The Listening Room, 1952. The C-print Previous Cables, 2022, makes a humorous nod to the futile however unshakable want for creative recognition by that includes one of many toy aliens from Toy Story. (These equivalent characters, famously, have been trapped in a merchandising machine, ready for the legendary claw to choose them out.) Scented chemical compounds dispersed by the house evoke a fleeting intimacy with success as properly; the woody citrus of Jessica Stockholder, 2022, leaves the distinct impression of an art-world superstar strolling previous.
The self-conscious sparsity highlights the goals and contingencies of Bailey’s creative output, neatly aligning a dematerialized aesthetic with the private actuality of residing underneath austerity economics. This contextual framing is strengthened by Studio photograph, 2008–22, which exhibits a brainlike form lined in newspaper headlines pertaining to the monetary crash of 2008. However simply when issues start to really feel settled, Bailey pulls the rug out once more, branding the again of 1 stretcher with a sticker seen to the road by the gallery window. It reads, merely, “fraud.”
— Calum Sutherland
