ART-PRESENTATION: Sophie Jung-Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water
Sophie Jung’s work operates at the intersection between performance, sculpture, and text. Her practice addresses representation and its pitfalls, both culturally as a system of disguised and shifting signs and personally as a way to track and record life. Her work oscillates between form and affect, pragmatism and romance, scrutinising accuracy and magical awe.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive
Sophie Jung for “Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water” developed a new sculptural installation, accompanied by a performance that exists as both a live event and a looping video work. For the use of different and the mixed elements in her work (Performance, Sculpture and Text) the artist says: “I grew up in Basel so I went to Art Basel as a teenager and I remember observing the way galleries spoke about the artworks on display. Depending on who their audience was, the language would change. I would watch them tune the pitch and I found the relation of object to text fascinating. Their texts obscured the object; you stopped seeing it”. For the exhibition, Jung transforms Blain|Southern’s lower gallery into an environment that recalls at once a bunker, an ice cellar, a Brechtian stage set, and a dressing room. Jung is a storyteller. In her sculptural installations, the performances and texts that attend them, she weaves free-wheeling, deeply idiosyncratic, and sharply funny narratives, which draw on everything from pop culture to philosophy, the idlest of thoughts to the most heartfelt of convictions. As the artist said in an interview by Izabella Scott said: “Theatre is the basis of what I do. Not so much the idea of a play, but more the totality of theatre as an environment – what happens behind the scenes, backstage, what the relationship is between props and actors.” During her performances, Jung walks the audience through an idiosyncratic collection of objects spread throughout the space. A partial inventory of what Jung terms the ‘things/concepts/objects/stuff’ that feed into “Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water” includes: Van Gogh’s 1886 painting “Shoes”, the similarities between Winnie the Pooh and Voltaire’s Candide, Brecht’s “Mother Courage”, her own grandmother’s long-hidden artistic practice, aeroplane emergency doors, ice packs, the layout of Sigmund Freud’s study, and Billie Whitelaw’s 1973 performance of Samuel Beckett’s one-person play “Not I”. Storytelling, here, is not about authority, or beginnings, middles and endings, but about the contingency of knowledge, and of meaning. It is also about taking pleasure in the dexterity of a single human voice. Sophie Jung’s Performances are scheduled at various points throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Info: Curator: Tom Morton, Blain|Southern Gallery, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration: 29/11/17-13/1/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com
