Featured Exhibitions
Pleasure Pest
Paige Silverman with writing by Gwen Dupré in collaboration with GUSH Residency.
5 Florence Street
Pleasure Pest
Paige Silverman with writing by Gwen Dupré in collaboration with GUSH Residency.
02 – 08.12.22
Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm
Synanthrope is a word which refers to a category of ‘undomesticated’ creatures who live and benefit from close association with people and their environments. Synanthropes — rats, ants, crows — know us and our homes better than we do, tracing our movements and intuiting our walls. Place your ear to the cold wall and listen for the scurrying of a rat navigating the cavity.
Pleasure Pest presents a series of Silverman’s sculptures and paintings created from found objects and domestic building materials. This new body of work plays with the intersection of the synanthropic relationship between human bodies, architecture, and nature—specifically the common household ‘pest’. Made during a time of isolation and illness, Silverman explores the bones of our homes and the boundaries of our bodies by viewing domestic and bodily interiors through the eyes of pests. Drawing on queer theory, Silverman climbs inside the wall where she becomes rooted to and a part of this fractured architecture: where basements rise, organisational systems ooze and seep, and pests are making a ferocious claim to life.
The exhibition follows a non-human world. In this lull, snails lay eggs and creep around undisturbed. In a house fallen silent we see what rises to the surface and what moods hang heavy in the air. Rather than fumigating, exterminating, and degerminating, Pleasure Pest watches the disintegration. Similarly, the text by Gwen Dupré anticipates this collapse. Folding and unfolding in feeling, its brooding and obsessive love makes its author write and rewrite a letter which may not be sent or received. Our narrator is infected by this mood, this rotting, this breaking of boundaries.
While overgrowth may once have repulsed, for Silverman and Dupré it is restorative and necessary. They call on us to redefine what is pure or toxic and understand it on their terms — as a Pleasure Pest.
Working in sculpture, painting, moving image, and text, Paige Silverman’s work questions orientation and structures of power, playing on material tensions to pervert the viewers experience. Their work straddles our presumptions about the power of industrial materials to subvert expectations of an object’s intention and highlight the impotency of the controlling human hand. Paige Silverman is from Los Angeles, California. They received their BFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, and their MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2021. Paige’s work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally in both group and solo shows. Paige is preparing for a show at the Royal Scottish Academy in early 2023.
Gwen Dupré is from Lockerbie, Dumfries & Galloway. Her writing has appeared in MAP Magazine, Lucy Writers, Nothing Personal, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe’s Glasgow anthology. The Moon City, a curatorial project, was shown at Govan Project Space in 2020. Gwen was the Wigtown Poetry Prize (Fresh Voice Award) 2022 runner up. She is currently working on the philosophy of Simone Weil.
GUSH Residency invites artists to explore fandom and the figure of the fan as a starting point for work and research. Working closely with artists and writers, this residency encourages participants to examine how fandom influences their practice. Participants on the programme will create works embracing citations, references, fan love for and obsession with muses in their life. GUSH has been working with Paige Silverman and Gwen Dupré since November 7th 2022.
With thanks to: Olivia Scott Berry, John Bloomfield, Matthew Cosslett, Lydia Davies, Lauren Gault, Caroline Gunty, Horse boy, Edward Gwyn Jones, Simon Lloyd, Ella Mahony, Sandra de Matos, Dominique Rivard and the team at Urban Office.
Supported by Urban Office and The Hope Scott Trust.
Photo credit: Sean P Campbell