Gabriele Beveridge – Lattice
Gabriele Beveridge is known for her sculptural works that put “display on display.” In her works she employs industrially produced materials made for improving one's aesthetic, or displaying products to do so, in combination with sunwashed, degraded images and eye-catching organic forms in glass.
Lattice (II) by Gabriele Leveridge, 2022
Since graduating with an MA Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2010, Beveridge’s artworks have included recurring motifs of display and presentation of the body: faded advertisements found in beauty salon windows, wigs parted and mounted to appear like irises, shop shelving panels and hooks mounted with hand blown glass globules – representing the precarity of human form in it’s easily commodified form.
Her work emerged as shops became threatened by the new presence of the internet, and her choice of materials seemed to gesture towards a nostalgia for a past where presentation was more physical than perceived through images. Having studied photography before finding sculpture as her dominant form of expression, the link between an object and its representation is ever-present. Why is it that images of sculpture, texture, tangible objects are so much more alluring than images of something flat?
Rather than presenting a critique of commodity goods by way of simulation, Beveridge takes the cosmetic mechanisms that prop up consumer desire and carries them into another space of contemplation. Kate Sutton described Beveridge’s works as dipping “into the dream life of consumer culture to deliver a contemporary vanitas attuned to the temporality of modern commodities, on-demand objects whose promises of “forever” are only as good as the next upgrade.”
When asked if her work is a direct criticism of consumerism Beveridge has responded that they “sit on a line between ambivalence and celebration” continuing to remind us “people are sold glossy, shiny things. They all fade, though, decay and turn to nothing." She seems to find beauty in this process of transformation, ageing.
Image of Lattice by Gabriele Beveridge, photographed by Juliana Vasquez.
In Lattice, where hand-blown glass is balanced on steel hooks resting in powder-coated steel shop fittings, there is a clear contrast between the organic objects created by the artist herself, and the mass-produced materials. The contradiction of forms is captivating yet jarring, could one relate the fragile glass objects to human forms existing, and not quite fitting into rigid structural frameworks?
Perhaps the title of her first solo exhibition at Seventeen Gallery gives a hint: Live Dead World. Artworks in the exhibition included those composed of mannequin parts. Of the exhibition Thierry Somers saw the artist's sculpture as representing the body itself, explaining “Beveridge assembled the inside of a human body using shop fittings and hand blown glass whereby the garment rails form the rib cage and the glass orbs the organs”. Beveridge herself explained the glasswork as breastlike: implants again referencing the “improvement” of the body, our image.
Gabriele Beveridge was born in Hong Kong and lived in London where she is represented by Seventeen Gallery. Her last exhibition with the gallery was Packed Stars Dividing in 2022, other exhibitions include Great Pretender at Kai Art Center (2021); Live Dead World at Seventeen (2018-19); Soft Shrinking Tremor at Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2017), Eternity Anyways at Chewday’s, London (2016), and Gold Diamond Park at Elizabeth Dee, New York (2014).
Lattice is on view at Shoreditch Arts Club until 4 June 2023.
