Exhibition Review for I’m so into you
Physics Room, 1 February – 28 March 2024
Dance music reels me into the Physics Room’s I’m so into you, where Laila Majid’s sculptural latex headrests greet me, fit to grace the booths of a nightclub or to cradle heads and legs at a gym. Her liquid-surfaced photo print makes its grey look almost damp. This is fitting for the steamy glass shower door of the artist’s it represents. Fingerprints on the headrests, the intimacy of the bathroom photo and its implied humidity bring your body to bear on the space. It could be your shower, your nightclub, your gym, your sweat.
Dayle Palfreyman’s handrail rings the left wall and back corner of the gallery and, with the wooden floors, turns the room into a dance studio. The bar is made of steel supports and beeswax instead of wood which scents the space with honey. A QR code summons soft cello music, that (if I wasn’t in public and terribly unskilled) I would move to, gently leaning on the bar. With its softness, the rail tells you it might melt if you hold it for long, inviting another awareness of your own body heat.
Abby makes the space darker so I can cosy up on a bean bag to watch the video work projected on a loosely strung sheet in the middle of the space. It ripples and makes the text at the bottom of the screen into a wave sometimes. The tenderness it evokes matches the deeply human film shining across its surface. When it shows a rippling body of water it feels as if there is no difference between it and the sheet. The images on the screen flit between a club in the dark, with silhouettes cutting shapes, to a hot day, a market and a cup of something delicious, the city, the men in light short-sleeved shirts and shorts, the back of a swimmer. One of those short-sleeved men walks and looks behind to catch the camera, making the viewer hold the handicam and be the voyeur. Overlaid dialogue discusses class, looking and attraction.
The exhibition catalogue provides a layered look at the philosophy behind these works, but even without it their sensuality carries their meaning. As the essay highlights, as people, in touching we are changed, in looking we are changed. By nature of being bodies we are constantly being remade together. I’m so into you, with its sweat and beeswax tells us just how sweet this really is.
meg doughty 