Plaguecation:

Within a practice that already engages collage and drawing as a means to contextualise clutter and collection, the Argos catalogue drawings evolved as a way of keeping time. Shielding prior to lockdown and confined to the house without any recourse to the outside world beyond deliveries and online communications, drawing the ‘entire’ catalogue provided Mendelson with a seemingly endless project, tied to ailing, weakened forms of retail.

It is early August and she is still home, safe, where things are fairly ordered but there is little space to make art.

Mendelson’s most recent works take the form of installations that present as dirty archives - drawn and painted works positioned in tandem with objects, in which schemata are established via placement but what is being stored presents a problem of either cleanliness or possible collapse. An interest in the home as a site of possible overload has prevailed since her PhD connecting collage and hoarding in 2015.

The Argos Catalogue, as a whole, presents seemingly endless choice via sameness and difference, speaking to both our desires and our processes of elimination - a rolodex of commerce as nauseating ferris wheel. The drawings are not an attempt to accurately describe what is on each page but to reflect the experience of its taxonomical modes of classification - an investigation of graphic novel-type encounters with spatial division to the languages of bargain and sales pitch.
Although this turned out to be the last ever Argos Catalogue, Mendelson did not know this on commencing the project. She is as surprised as anyone to have spent the past weeks drawing chocolate fountains, paddling pools, soft furnishings, cat toys, kinetic sand and tv brackets. She did, however always expect to spend a lifetime drawing play-doh pretzels. Argos does not deliver to her area.

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Real Time, a group exhibition of works observed from life by artists who employ a range of strategies to tweak the view.

In this odd moment, the realities they speak of appear to embody a similar sense of shift, between perfunctory and less definable states of play. While some works propose a pictorial means of escape, others alert us to the curious and overlooked details of ordinary life revealed when the area of focus becomes small.

The exhibition includes works in a variety of media that refer to aspects of the painterly process. All have been made in plain sight of their sources and involve significant time investment. This might be hours in the studio, or journeys undertaken – from rabbit-hole research routes through art and other histories, to real-life dérives – that are essential to their manufacture.

Curated by Rebecca Geldard.
Exhibiting artists: Neil Gall, Martin Gayford, Nicky Hirst, Lee Maelzer, Zoë Mendelson