COMEDY OF MENACE is pleased to present Grinding, an exhibition featuring works by Millie Rose Dobree, Niamh Dale and Sean Weisgerber, at Broncko Bianchi, London. The exhibition will be open by appointment from the 24th-30th of September, with a PV on the 23rd of September from 6-8pm.
Everyone is grinding. Or, on the grind. Locking into their grindset. Struggling, grinding, shining. Allegedly. They grind on: their work, their selves, their (potential) lovers. It’s a term both laborious, sacrificial and erotic. It’s integral to contemporary notions of what labour is. It’s a mindset, an ethics, a philosophy (or lack of). It’s a gyrating motion of one’s lower body onto another’s. Dobree undercuts the technics of reproduction, through re-printed rave posters and “suicidal” bronze casts of Mylar party balloons and objects courtesy of Vinted’s algorithm, inversely rigging them toward a recursive logic of singular reduction; Dale’s cardboard boxes, found on London street corners in a chase that is equal parts materialist ritual and bizarre grind, are engraved (and imbued) with the crappy charm of a tenderly awkward lesbian poetics; Weisgerber’s excruciating amounts of artistic labour - like a canvas of painstakingly handpainted price stickers - end up looking like “derivative” re-modernist gestures, exposing a masochist underbelly of 60’s Conceptualism. What’s left after the grind, when whatever was grinded is ground? The struggle is guaranteed. The grind is embraced. The shine is probably a scam.
