Lingered in a Rude Form
Review of Lingered in a Rude Form
BLINDSIDE, 2024.
Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper, Lingered in a Rude Form, installation view. Blindside Summer Studio 2023–24. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
Exhibited in January at Blindside Gallery, Lingered in a Rude Form marked the culmination of the 2023–24 summer studio residency of collaborators Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper. During the residency, the artists investigated the concept and function of the studio, understood as a place of intense creative production and resolved material outcomes. Aaron and Lilly’s practices and subsequent investigations negated this rigid notion, centring on material-led assemblages and spatial relations. Their creative practices are not strictly strategic or manageable, rather, the logic in their process manifests in the intuitive arrangement and assembly of materials. This approach allows for a departure from the conventional constraints of artistic production, emphasising the importance of a given site’s spatial dynamics and the transformative power inherent in the composition of materials within a given environment–public or private.
Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper, Lingered in a Rude Form, installation view. Blindside Summer Studio 2023–24. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
Operating as a nebula of experimental traces, Lingered in a Rude Form took the shape of a precarious installation. Fixed together with white sticky tape, three sheets of semi-opaque plastic hung from corresponding beams on the gallery ceiling. The installation insisted the audience kink their necks back to examine the work, or if personal comfort permitted, to sit or lay on the floor. Instead of the pageantry of religious imagery experienced in the Sistine Chapel, Aaron and Lilly presented us with mass-produced materials: 7/11 coffee cups, single-use plastic cutlery, wire coat hangers, Band-Aid branded plasters and paper debris that were haphazardly flat laid in clusters. These commonly used and discarded materials transformed from utilitarian into carefully selected art objects, arranged amongst key devices to create a constellation of contemporary artefacts. A white styrofoam block, yellow and blue bungee cord, a strawberry blonde wig, a blue bicycle helmet and a small metal tag with the inscription ‘Ted Barrett’ acted as anchors for the suspended assemblies. Forces of gravity, space, and light, obscured and distorted the conjunction of objects within the visual field. Their weight and texture became compressed and flattened, reminiscent of photocopier scans.
Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper, Lingered in a Rude Form, installation view. Blindside Summer Studio 2023–24. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
Standing up, closer to the installation, the sheet bowed, hanging down in sections where my head almost grazed the plastic. Sections of tape had begun to lose their grip, pointing towards the inevitable collapse and fluctuating nature of the artists’ installation. Perforation marks formed sequences of lines and rectangular patterns across the gallery walls. The punctures stopped where one inconspicuous white plank leaned vertically against the back right wall. Circling back to view the work from another angle, my gaze was drawn to a collection of A5-sized artist’s cards nestled on the floor below the exhibition wall text. The six, randomly assorted images documented Aaron and Lilly’s tests, material piles and visual perspectives from their summer residency. These photographic mementoes–gifts to the audience–also held clues, referencing objects' histories and the wall works that produced the perforations. The installation, images, and the dynamic relationship between the objects suggested an in-between state, a temporal flux and a mediation on the material. Processes of categorising and the marrying of form, function, and size with particular architectural features alluded to the time between making–collectings; moments of contemplation and perspectives in flux –parts of the practice which would be otherwise invisible. The installation became a study of temporality in practice, communicated through the abstract language and logic in the resulting assemblage, described by Lilly as encounter → intervention → exchange. The nature of this practice wasn’t linear, instead, it operated circularly, generating relational possibilities and momentum from the given space.
Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper, Lingered in a Rude Form, installation view. Blindside Summer Studio 2023–24. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
In his 2017 essay Theory of the Minor, Chris Sharp argues that minor art, as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, offers a valuable lens through which to understand contemporary cultural production and resistance to dominant power structures. Sharp refers to the minor, not as lesser or secondary to the major, but rather characterised by resistance. This is not an intentional political position, but a natural consequence of the practice itself. It is through this definition that we can understand minor art as also inherently queer. Queer not in the form of representation, but in its non-classifiability, in addition to its inherent eschewal of the logic of a project which has identifiable beginnings and endings. Similarly, Aaron and Lilly’s collaborative residency ‘outcome’, cannot be reduced to a single formula or tactic, instead, it refuses classification through a multiplicity of methods. However, what flows through Aaron and Lilly’s collaborative practice is the development of their unique and idiosyncratic language, which resists explanation and conventional devices. Aaron and Lilly recognise the inherent political nature of form, and the imperative for art to authentically speak for itself by exhibiting their outcome in opposition to resolution.
Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper, Lingered in a Rude Form, installation view. Blindside Summer Studio 2023–24. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
Notes of Exchange was a public program which evolved from the artist's shared studio language and complemented the logic of the residency outcome. Unbounded by rules or scale, the program provided an opportunity for the public to gift the artists found materials. Contributors dropped off, exchanged and participated by integrating objects and materials into the exhibition such as a neon pink rope, paper sketches, miniature Bonne Maman jam jars and empty vape canisters. This endearing gesture fostered social collaboration and notions of community practice, enabling the artists to explore new spatial relationships and possibilities with unfamiliar materials. Drawing from Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, ‘art as a state of encounter’, the artists’ acted as mediators facilitating additions to their installation from the public’s interaction mid-exhibition. Operating with an intentional degree of randomness, the introduced objects reconfigured the installation, connecting the collapsed plastic sheet to the floor, accentuating the friction and tension in the pre-existing unfixed forms. The public program provided an opportunity for communal interaction and challenged conventional notions of residency outcomes by emphasising shared experiences, exchange and community over resolved forms.
Aaron Ashwood and Lilly Skipper, Lingered in a Rude Form, installation view. Blindside Summer Studio 2023–24. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
Threads of resourcefulness, sustainability, consumption, and circular economies come to mind while contemplating Lingered in a Rude Form, but what is constant is Aaron and Lilly’s idiosyncratic language and sensitivity to space and form. Similarly, their selection of mass-produced objects, however familiar and temporary, led to risks and slippages in their assembly, resulting in tension between each other and space. Exhibition outcomes for residencies are often expected to include a selection of refined artworks that adhere to thematic or visual reference. Rather than a disinterest in resolved works, the practices of Aaron and Lilly refused this convention completely, engaging with Blindside Gallery as an extension of studio practice. The resulting exhibition articulated practice in flux, pointing to multiple temporal references of the past (documentation through artist cards), the present (the fluctuating precarious nature of the installation), and the future (introducing new objects and relations through the public program). By inviting the public to encounter and engage with the artwork the observer ultimately 'finalised' the artwork through their interpretation of the work and, consequently, their connection to the environment. It is through this logic, one where the artist facilitates and the audience participates (even as a voyeur), that Lingered in a Rude Form demonstrates the ongoing process as a form of resolution. Within this collaborative practice, art functions not as an end in itself but as a means, a vehicle in which language and relations can be formed, and continuous possibilities can be fostered.
ARTISTS: Aaron Ashwood, Lilly Skipper