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The Residence Gallery presents Carl Gent in his debut solo exhibition, Wiðercwedolu þá Glésincga. This new body of work attempts to re-historicise and re-fictionalise the biographical record of Cynethryth, eighth-century Queen of the Mercians.
Working across installation, text, performance and print, Gent combines texturally allergic and incompatible materials in an aim to erode the associative histories embedded within them. Be it absinthe, 21st century urban architecture or the romantic landscapes employed by cinematic corporatism, a humiliation of meaning is attempted. In place of this robbed signification is the desire for a clearing that can permit other voices to be heard. Explicitly ecological; liberation from material anthropocentricism is attempted.
Recent work has involved re-drawing CGI movie studio logos in mezzotint etching, hack-sawing gnomes off of decorative indoor water fountains, conducting arguments about cosmic colonialism with Google Mars' conversational bot MELIZA and hosting a symposium on the future where a range of futurologists were asked to present their innately contradictory research while undergoing the physical labour required to mix a large quantity of daub, the historical building material.
Carl Gent is an artist, musician and writer from Bexhill-on-sea, UK. They received their MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2015 and their BA (Hons) in Fine Art from UCA, Farnham in 2009. Recent exhibitions include De Regreso a la Isla at Casal Solleric, Palma, Spain; L’Heure Verte: 1st Tasting at Green Ray, London; Questions for Meliza hosted by cosmoscarl.com and performed at Minor Delay; Tongue of the Preinoculated #2 at the Museum of Technology at Cambridge; The Space of No Exception, Sokol Gallery, Moscow; Ground Ground, Cafe Oto Project Space, London; and Bad Truth for the IV Moscow Biennale for Young Art.
They co-curated Material Cryptographies, a two-day seminar considering the implications of encryption practices for contemporary existence and art-making at Tenderpixel, London; performed at Gustav Metzger’s Facing Extinction conference; and have recently been at residence at the Study Week devised by Jesse Darling at Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn, UK and the ICA/Goldsmiths Summer School at Academic Dacha, Vishny Volochok, Russia.
Gallery hours: Thurs. - Sat. 11am - 6pm, Sun. 12 - 5pm, Wed. by appointment
The Residence Gallery
