Josh Lilley is proud to present Cites, an exhibition which explores acts of biography and the body as a site of transmediation. Bringing together the sculptural work of four intergenerational female artists - Genesis Belanger, Kaari Upson, Rebecca Bellantoni and Rebecca Nassauer - the gallery becomes an activated space of storytelling; with each object offering provocations on the real and the speculated experience, and examining the ways in which we value, or understand, testament. Within these forms, objects become the vestiges of selfhood and give way to an alternative, or more vulnerable, narrative.

In Foucault’s theory of biopower, he suggests that the body is a site of subjugation, through its obedience to physical limitations or prescribed expectations. This exhibition considers the consequence of a liberated existential form; a body free of consigned meaning which assumes an alternative mode of being. The collection of works reckon with expanded versions of the self or the embodied experience; encompassing ideas of surrogacy, holistic knowledge, ephemerality and transmutation. 

Genesis Belanger’s (1978, USA) sculptural work, staged tableaux of high consumer culture, often recalls a mid-century aesthetic. In symbolically evoking the birth of the advertising era, Belanger calls to arms its 1950s charge; the compulsion for desirability and the adaptability of the female self. Occupying a space in between the real and the fictional, her works draw out a pervasive commentary on the lived feminine experience; here preserved in stone, porcelain, wood and steel. Objects are fetishised - in this latest work with blooming flowers, berries and manicured hands; all gestures towards the fractionalised or compartmentalised female form. Referencing the background, decorative imagery of two classical works - the work anecdotally aligns itself with the invisible labour of ‘women’s work’. In all of Belanger’s works, it is the absence of the fully formed body which is apparent through decoys, as if waiting for a protagonist to intervene and take charge of the narrative.

In the work of Kaari Upson (1970 – 2021, USA), we see a convergence of self and other; deliberately rejecting one singular version of identity in favour of a more fluid, agile proposition. Beginning with TheLarry Project (2005–12) - a long-form work by Upson where she narrativised the life of an unknown childhood neighbour (dubbed Larry) through performance, painting, installations and film - Upson’s work often drew on the speculative as a means of exploring self-determination and empowerment. Included in the exhibition are Upson’s mattress works, created later in her career and after her diagnosis of breast cancer, in which we see an evolution of this idea: a story reflected in a discarded domestic object, a testament to the body that once occupied it. But whose body, and whose story? Moulded in silicone replicating mattresses which Upson discovered on the street, and marked to indicate visceral debris, Upson here draws connections between fiction and fact, past and present, between one and another.

Rebecca Bellantoni (1981, UK) takes us beyond the realms of the physical and into the seemingly intangible world, considering the spaces and ideologies which shape our existence, and the legacy that presents. A new work inspired by the Gri Gri bags of Afro Caribbean spiritual systems - small cloth bags containing ritual objects of self-identification, worn by its carrier as protection - will hang in dialogue with a flag, or wall-based tapestry. Crafted from ceramic, these vessels take on anthropomorphic form - capturing the energy of an individual in its glorious imperfection - and speak to the accumulation of knowledge and selfhood, its transcendence into wisdom, but also to what is taken away through acts of colonial dispossession. Suspended from the ceiling and its surface embellishments broken in parts, it also speaks of knowledge’s fragility. The flag echoes this process through concentric circles, a call to focus and the expansion of one’s own self-knowing, as well as understanding a journey as one smaller part of a multi-generational whole.

Two historic, late career works by the artist Rebecca Nassauer (1951–2010, UK) turn the concept of artifact on its head, replacing materials of formal artistic integrity with those which formed part of an increasingly intimate world, as she battled with her own bodily limitations during illness. Nest-like formations made of materials akin to ‘string and sealing wax’ call to mind childhood nursery rhymes and doll-houses, kept safe high above the corporeality of everyday life. A sea of characters float puppet-like on sticks, precarious like their creator, and yet filled with animation and the power of exchange. Their shadows on the wall recall the allegory of Plato’s Cave, where the potential for enlightenment grows with one’s own proximity to the object. In these mediations, we are able to identify a reconciliation of the self and the imagined self through a use of divergent materials and instrumentality. They are imbued with a sense of purpose, like talismans of future prosperity. And through their humorous, and deeply personal invocation, they act as mechanisms which can both sustain the individual, and act as its agents, in perpetuity.

As an investigation of both the limitations and the potential of lived experience, Cites serves to illuminate the body as witness, and ultimately the marks of one's existence. It reflects on the externalization of self and considers what we choose to hold close and what we choose to give away, in the pursuit of identity. This is an exhibition about how we craft our own narrative, or how we become part of a greater one.