Gabriele Beveridge
Gold Diamond Park
November 7 – December 20, 2014
“What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?”
“Why pamper life's complexity
When the leather runs smooth
On the passenger's seat?“
- The Smiths, This Charming Man
In Gabriele Beveridge’s first solo show in the USA, the title is a mislead, or rather a hint at a desired state – no gold, no diamonds, but instead a faded high street romance towards the promised glamour of those words..
Beveridge uses shop display racks, promotional hair salon posters featuring forgotten models and cheap reproduction jewelry sold by the yard in market stalls and discount stores. This is the female glamour of Morrissey’s Seaside Town. The work neither criticizes nor celebrates this line, but rather reappropriates it as a common truth.
In the main gallery, seven large wall works, made from the ceiling panels of the 1970’s public library that is the artist’s studio and home, are framed in shades of muted pastel color. Onto these panels, shop mannequin hands hold chains, tie-dye shirts and crystal balls: the works sit between a language of minimal painting and notes of what Mike Kelly referred to as the ‘uncanny’.
Alongside Beveridge’s strategic positioning of these objects, the potential obsolescence of the faded images she has found distinctly develop an unsettling conversation around how beauty is sold to us, and how it is bound, like the photographs, to eventually show its age.
-Darren Flook
Gabriele Beveridge (b. 1985, Hong Kong) has exhibited internationally in the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include: Health and Strength, La Salle de Bains, Lyon, FR, Mistake or Design, Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK and Incidental Healer, Van Horbourg, Zurich, CH. This is the artist’s first solo show in the United States.