Hospital

The Main Gallery at South London Gallery is painted a cold blush pink and is occupied with a tall pile of wooden planks amalgamated into rickety towers in gradual collapse. They are leaning against each other—relational balance is important—and at their extremities are nested periodicals, fishing poles, clusters of dirt, porcelain hardware (toilets). The whole melancholy decor was sprayed, painted, or somehow coated in white. A flimsy white. At a closer look, the installation is possibly simply edged into dizzy sleep. A small glass bowl is afixed to one side of a wall, captioned: “Dust, sprinkle at will”. It is a flour-like white powder.

Pope.L’s solo exhibition is distributed over seven galleries, plus one outside installation. Across the street in the former Peckham Road Fire Station—the annexe, a small dark room is set with a grid like hang of framed letter drawings and empty frames, some facing us, or towards the wall, it depends. The room is to be entered with a flashlight, as it is completely plunged in darkness. The above ground floor galleries offer rooms with a view over Peckham Road, and harbour empty shelves, dripping bottles, wine, plastic props, carafes. Scattered, but positioned. Another space shields orange dried marigolds sprawled all over the floor. A video work documents free roaming poultry and baby goats mindlessly wrecking a small scale straw-like looking edifice, covered in seeds. It too, collapses. Our presence and the quality of our attention may be the star of the show.

In Pope.L’s own words: the material is performing. Watching holes and forgetfulness could hardly be more mournful. The weight, as we meander at times drifting, split off, detached, in our own lives and from our own sound mind, is ill at ease. Awake yet out of it both. It reminded me of certain passages of Sartre’s ‘La nausée’.

We are very much in the realm of metaphor. Each mock-up here is its own enactment. Denial–the exposing of it, I think, is not so much about how hard we are trying to see, rather how much we are able to make ourselves aware of the roving absurdities populating our singular experience. Noted another association with Goddard’s ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ but because of the stacking up of acts, the sequencing. Not a lineal story. Maybe. It does take some effort to make sense of the show as a whole but this might be a curatorial stance. Monitoring iterations of neglect is hard-hitting.