TJ Wilcox

Hiding in Plain Sight

★★☆☆☆

On until 2 October 2024

Vanity proceeds in circles. In the 1920s, the Irish designer Gray built herself a villa on the French Riviera. She and the structure would have become icons, but a more famous architect initially took the spotlight. It thus took a hundred years for a trust to turn the building into a tourist attraction. 

Why we might care is not obvious. Heritage projects often commission artists to “research” and twist complex narratives into marketing collateral. The history revisionist Wilcox made a two-projector film for Gray’s tiny home cinema. A docu-fiction track meets Baudelaire in his frame, laying the ground for some greater legend. 

This trivia is too tiresome to fact-check and should have stayed on the French coast. Only vanity can explain the film’s London outing. The garishly blue, metallic still prints don’t even make for good postcards.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

James White: Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon at Anthony Wilkinson ★★★★☆

James White

Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon

★★★★☆

Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.

The Stars Fell on Alabama at Edel Assanti ★★★☆☆

Mary L. Bennett, Richard Dial, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Mose Tolliver

The Stars Fell on Alabama: Southern Black Renaissance

★★★☆☆

The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett, >anticorpo< at Galerie Neu and Emalin ★★★★☆

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett

>anticorpo<

★★★★☆

Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket.

Yannis Maniatakos, Four Paintings at Sylvia Kouvali ★★★☆☆

Estate of Yiannis Maniatakos

Four Paintings

★★★☆☆

Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.

The Imaginary Institution of India at Barbican ★★★★★

The Imaginary Institution of India

★★★★★

How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the…

Alia Farid, Elsewhere at Chisenhale ★★★☆☆

Alia Farid

Elsewhere

★★★☆☆

There is no answer in the work. Its cause and the object become enmeshed in a bland, exoticized mess. 

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