Once we peered ass-deep in ivy through the slatted wooden blinds of a country cottage. Two men and a woman stood naked within, slathering themselves in food by-products. It was two in the morning in our middle class suburb, Smithtown…

 A place so boring they gave it a boring name.

Bedrooms Have Windows, Kevin Killian

Faces gazing out at us from shadowy rooms and hallways. A soft voice beckoning us closer, broaching the glass panes that both separate and unite interior and exterior space. Kittens cuddle, pressed cheek to cheek; Pluto the dog plays by his kennel. Strung together on a taut rope, a tired chorus line performs, bodies dancing and twisting, suspended in movement. Cartoon birds are delicately rendered mid-flight, tussling, falling, and picking us flowers. 

Elsewhere, objects start to take on corporeal attributes, speaking to specific bodies or groups. Plastic water bottles warmed by a radiator hold the promise of a gender transition. As the bottles heat up, BPA, chemically similar to oestrogen, bleeds into the water inside. Remnants of daily life left discarded in public spaces are collected, cared for and repurposed, transformed into sculptural works. A pride flag from the façade of the Joiners Arms (1977-2015), a historic queer venue, looks down on the space, its rainbow hues dulled and sullied by decades of constant exposure and use as a marker of visibility. 

Houses too, have windows. Kevin Killian’s act of looking in on naughty suburban life is echoed in Ben’s painting Interior. The work depicts a detached suburban house; its windows allow us small but intrusive glimpses into the house and its inhabitants. We can’t help but look as these vignettes coalesce to form a blended whole, buckling under the weight of combined desire and anxiety, spilling uncomfortably out into the street. Edward’s video, The Town Square, presents a reversal of this. We’re now positioned inside, with him, looking out. Again, the window exists as a threshold that separates inside space from the world outside, or vice versa. The camera pans, slowly following a drawing Edward has directly applied to the window during a period of isolation and is accompanied by a quiet voiceover as if whispered in our ear. Superimposed onto a distant urban skyline, faces, hands and limbs intertwine, reaching out across the glass and on to the cityscape below. 

The various bodies, characters, objects and images in Forum flit between public and private, often conflating the two. Our Contact drawings seek to unmask such private obsessions or desires. Taken from online sources, anonymous memetic images for personal pleasure and correspondence are exposed and made public in their translation from digital image to drawing. Slowly and mechanically rendered in graphite, the images form a textural ambiguity, one that allows them a newfound autonomy, now withholding from their audience and no longer an object of passive consumption. In a similar vein, though this time mining from physical as opposed to digital space, Maddy repurposes discarded fragments of metal and plastic objects. Through delicate reconfiguration, her objects of choice – a twinkling, rhinestoned belt buckle, a broken handle, public signage – are given a sense of playful ornamentation and eroticism. Incongruous items are collaged, linked in compelling and unexpected ways.

A sugary, pastel colour palette underscores this show. Colourful birds adorn paper boxes. They wrestle with plants and worms, and with one another. One, the happy recipient of a golden shower, kneeling proudly in a pool of anonymous piss. Nearby, two birdies fight over a flower, its twisted stem leaking fluid. Sweetness here is cut through with a sense of deviancy. Elsewhere, quite literally sugary, a row of m&m’s in the ubiquitous colours of red, white and blue offers the following invitation: You could be me / I could be you. A handful of George’s candy shared amongst friends draws us closer together– maybe until the lines between you and me blur completely– maybe until we need a filling. 

Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby