Absent Without Leave

Solo Show at Sid Motion Gallery 
5 November – 26 November 2022

 

Grave Architecture, 2022
Materiality, as expressed through works of art, reaches well beyond the atomic fact of the art object and the physical matter that comprises its make up and connects to as well as frames—in a broad sense—content, meaning, conditions of production, alongside an artist’s location and personal history as well as those locations and histories pertaining to viewers. All of this contains a residue of time, if not indeed history, and continues to evolve in and over time. Materiality is the platform on which we begin to build if not locate the corporal and intellectual—surely even the emotive and libidinal—aesthetic response to a work of art. That sounds heavy, perhaps too much so particularly at the start of a short piece of writing on work and an artist I am close to. But there you go. I have come to understand Jo Dennis the artist as a collector of materialities. Previously Jo would have gleefully admitted to bordering on being a hoarder of ‘stuff’. She is certainly ‘at home’ in the interstitial spaces of a city at its post-industrial margins, but all this places emphasis on the stuff of items or things over and above a powerfully magnetic attraction that both animates and structures aesthetic experience of exactly those spaces, situations and places and the materialities so palpably present in her work.
John Slyce 


Exhibition text by John Slyce

Exhibition Review on Curatorial Affairs by Millie Walton

Exhibition Review by Sara Thorsen Fredborg