March 17th - July 14th 2008
Viewed from the street 24 hours
Launch Thursday 3rd April
6:30 - 8:30pm
all welcome
Waterloo Health Centre
5 Lower Marsh
London
SE1 7RJ
map
Tube: Lambeth North, Waterloo
Rail: Waterloo
Buses: 12, 53, 76, 77, 176, 211, 341, 381
This is Space Station Sixty-Five's second off-site window project at this London GP practice. The Sapce Station Sixty-Five North Cross Road gallery and project space is undergoing architectural development. Please see the gallery website for this and further projects during 2008
Press Release:
The Nexus Treatment
A Space Station Sixty-Five Project at Waterloo Health Centre
Diamonds are forever ...
Seen through these St. Laurent glasses
And I’ve realized that I’ve arrived...
Kanye West, from Late Registration
In the crystalline animated world of Sarah Doyle “The Nexus Treatment” whirls and sparkles forever and ever. Counter intuitively utilising a hand made methodology,and consciously eschewing technological processes Doyle has crafted a Victorianesque hall of mirrors, with images taken from popular culture.
In the often rarefied realm of pedantic high art Doyle’s constituency is a revolutionary one She passionately and precisely studies and reveals the complex codes of young teenagers. Trawling through outdated hip hop videos, talking to and working with her younger siblings she identifies the “watch me now” shapes and movements which signify a universal need to belong, to be part of a group to fit in and to show off.
Doyle’s appropriation of this world, however, is no cheap holiday, there is an immersion and identification with it which goes back to her own experience of arriving in England as a teenager having been brought up in Africa. Unaware of the prevailing popular culture signifiers, references to TV shows, and imperceptible shifts in style she found herself to be “uncool” an outsider.
Her work meshes this yearning to belong, with a magical kaleidescopia of desire. The looped hand drawn images revealed in the facets of the spinning jeweled mirrors, when cut from their original meaning, take on a hypnotic quality. Like tarnished ballerinas on the top of a music box, Doyle’s tough girls dance for eternity in their strangely compelling cabinet of curiosities.
The Nexus Treatment is based on the title of a salon sign Doyle found near her home in South London. When googled, Doyle was amazed to find that it was revealed to be “an organization that designs and operates treatment programs for a wide range of child and adolescent problems” and it was also “a conditioning treatment used on Afro hair to make it more silky and straight like Caucasian hair” Both meanings strangely reverberated with the artist’s work. “I really liked the name” says Doyle “ it sounded futuristic and with the nexus meaning the center of focus it fitted with the work I had in mind”
Mixing futuristic elements and contemporary cultural references with clunky hobbyesue machinery, The Nexus Treatment signposts not only novel methods of art production but also introduces new places from where that work can be made.
Alex Michon
Sarah Doyle’s previous work has used other forms of dead media such as expoliting records to create drawing tools. Doyle has shown internationally in Japan and the Michael Jackson gallery in Germany. Her animation work was shown at the Whitechapel, Gasworks and The Portman gallery among others. She was part of Splashdown for Space Station Sixty-Five during the Whitstable Biennale 2006 and will be undertaking a commission for Space Station Sixty-Five during 2008.
Sarah Doyle lives and works in London.
Alex Michon is an artist writer and curator.
