The Night Star
20 June – 31 October 2021
Archive 00

When I think about my friend, I think about raving in London in the 1990s when we were teenagers, and all of the trouble we got into. Mostly drum and bass, with a little bit of garage. Before we went out, I would walk down along Jamaica Road to her house, threading through the estate by the river to her mum’s flat. We would laugh at the City businessmen buying up the new build townhouses that now blocked the view of the river from the flats. Imagine paying for the view and thinking that meant you owned it? Wankers.

This new suite of works brings together Siena’s elegant and obscene ink drawings that mock American consumer culture while mimicking its language, with a series of videos and monuments to Inanna. In the videos, which hover somewhere between a music video and a porno, colors and shapes shake and blend and morph. There she is, returning the gaze from a grid of YouTube videos. Unsettling, transgressive, and absolutely shameless — or simply having traveled through other people’s shame and out the other side. I don’t know where her fearlessness comes from, but she has always been a guide.

When 3-d printed objects are made they look born, strands of raw material still sticking to them that have to be sloughed off like a snake shedding its skin, like something subterranean. They have that sublime quality of being made by extra-human intelligence that forms in nature sometimes have. There is something flawless and thrilling about these 3-d printed monuments of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality, power, and transgression.

I think raving and the type of release and catharsis that can happen on a sweaty dance floor on the third floor of a vacant office building in Acton is an example of Inanna’s wild energy, and perhaps the comedown is analogous to her descent into the underworld. In Post-Gravity Citizen the POV shifts between found footage of the Dubai Mall, the largest shopping center in the world, and Siena asleep in bed, dreaming the mall’s numbing fluorescent lighting, water features, and food halls. Lights on, sweaty mess, time to straggle out into night buses and first trains, mingling with confused early commuters. Things happy people do.

Elena Harvey Collins
Curator, Art Space Gallery, USA
To view the show visit > Archive OO