Alexandra Metcalf turns a London gallery into an eerie medical facility in new exhibition ‘Gaaaaaaasp’

Alexandra Metcalf’s first public solo exhibition begins in a ready room. Nondescript gray carpet, low ceiling, an previous tv set on a high-up shelf within the nook. Chairs organized across the periphery at odd intervals recommend the teams who could enter such an area – households, {couples} – and their intuition to separate themselves by means of a sequence of small however important gaps.

That is one in all two constructed areas that reimagine The Perimeter gallery in London as a form of medical facility. We recognise it as such, however the nearer we glance, the extra slippery and unusual these areas develop into. The ready room has an commentary window wanting right into a room stuffed with spotlit sculptures constructed from lengthy picket strolling sticks – a recurring motif in Metcalf’s observe. At their sides, they cradle stained glass orbs depicting silhouettes of timber which seem, within the shadows on the wall behind, cell-like, invoking bodily matter, one thing rising or spreading, a illness or a life-form. Metcalf’s title for the sequence, Globus/Womb, factors to this duality: ‘one thing nurturing but additionally burdensome, historic but plastic. There’s a protracted historical past of globes as symbols of management, data, energy – and I needed to queer that historical past, to make the shape really feel tender, even awkward.’ The reference to wombs is equally symbolic, suggesting ‘areas the place time folds in on itself, collapses, displays.’

This sense of temporal collapse seeps out into the room itself. Psychedelic yellow patterned wallpaper evokes a sixties aesthetic, the period of counterculture, whereas the repurposed Victorian picket panelling brings to thoughts an age of oppression. The tv, as an alternative of enjoying the sorts of promotional wellbeing movies we would affiliate with up to date hospital settings, performs fuzzy footage of the artist herself, portray a mural onto the wall of her mom’s room or in remedy periods the place the unique sound is overcut by bursts of music. Cam 2017/2018 was revamped the course of the 12 months, and information Metcalf’s psychological decline after the demise of her mom, which ultimately led to her being admitted right into a psychiatric facility. It’s a highly effective reminder that Metcalf is drawing on private expertise, but additionally that we step into these areas not a lot as a participant however as a voyeur – a place that’s deeply uncomfortable and deliberately so. It attracts our consideration not simply to the passivity with which historical past has borne witness to the mistreatment of psychiatric sufferers, significantly girls, however the continued fetishation of the ‘tortured artist.’

Metcalf performs as much as this notion as a lot as she skews it. In I AM MY OWN RIOT & BEST FRIEND, a rare two-panelled portray spanning over 5 metres in size, a stereotypically ‘female’ aesthetic – ornamental doilie-esque patterning, depictions of candy-coloured striped materials, guffawing girlish figures (self-portraits) – blurs with nightmarish visions. Leaking patches of yellow and purple are suggestive of blood, open wounds, whereas scratch marks trace at bodily frustration or ache.

The portray is one in all two hung throughout the second constructed area, upstairs within the gallery, that loosely resembles a surgical room. Right here, the flooring has been changed with pale pink linoleum and a Victorian drain has been put in. Two floral solar loungers sprung out of previous trunks appear as if hospital beds with two anthropomorphic mild sculptures standing in for sufferers: one hunched, the opposite mendacity again prostrate. They’re each ‘switched on’ with 4 bulbs, lighting up their faces, however it’s a fragile mild – one, that because the accompanying ‘energy field’ and cables recommend, can simply be switched off. To Metcalf, these works aren’t a lot objects ‘as traces – psychic residues in bodily type.’

Just like the wallpaper downstairs, additionally they evoke a unique time, referencing Lee Bontecou’s fuel masks flowers from the Nineteen Sixties and with it the now ghostly promise of futuristic optimism as soon as related to early plastics. Metcalf provides, ‘In my work, mild performs a hauntological function: not as readability, however as a flickering return, a spectral illumination of what’s now not absolutely current. It leaks, glows, stains – hardly ever naturalistic, extra emotional than bodily. It animates absence, pointing not simply to what’s seen, however to what has been obscured, repressed, or forgotten.’

The convergence of disparate worlds, attitudes and aesthetics – that of medical institutionalisation and of leisure, aspirations of the previous and fashionable sensibility, magnificence and horror – works to humorous and unsettling impact however it’s also pointed. Psychiatric sufferers of the previous had been usually sectioned with out or towards their consent, a observe which nonetheless continues immediately in instances deemed to contain severe threat. Such interventions are framed within the language of care – ‘retreats’, ‘rehabilitation’ – however the realities of what occurs inside these amenities could be opaque. Metcalf’s work reminds us that regardless of evolving language and coverage, questions round company, consent and institutional energy stay deeply contested.

The layering of her work particularly speaks to this notion of overlaying up or concealment, but additionally to the buildup of time and the circularity of historical past, the methods by which it resurfaces and permeates the current. Figures, furnishings and architectural buildings stand up from marbled swirls of paint or behind hazy washes of acid yellow. It’s not clear the place these visions come from, whether or not they’re recollections or creativeness, reality or fiction, and in a means that is inappropriate: they’re merely a part of a maelstrom of expertise, one by which we’re all, personally and collectively, caught. In Gaaaaaaasp, Metcalf makes us really feel that grip: we’re held not solely in her private trauma, but additionally within the bigger, systemic forces that form our lives.