MAKING LOVE TO THE THINGS I HATE
MAKING LOVE TO THE THINGS I HATE
MAKING LOVE TO THE THINGS I HATE
MAKING LOVE TO THE THINGS I HATE
ALMOST EMPTY PLASTIC BOTTLES OF WHATEVER
MAKING
LOVE TO
I
MAKING
HATE
HATE
THE THINGS
LOVE TO
I
THE THINGS
EMPTY PLASTIC BOTTLES OF WHATEVER
Thanks for that apple
Thanks for that apple
don't get ill
don't get ill
don't get ill
don't get ill
don't get ill
don't get ill
don't get ill
don't get ill
do
you know what
I
mean?
do
you know what
I
mean?
do you know whatI mean?
do you know whatI mean?
do you know whatI mean?
fuck
t h e m
¡Que se jodan!(fuck them)
¡Que se jodan!(fuck them)
¡Que se jodan!
(fuck them)
don't get ill
don't get ill
Y O U C A N ' T E S C A P E
Y O U C A N ' T E S C A P E
Making love with the things I hate is the first London solo exhibition of Spanish artist Maria de la O Garrido. The exhibition addresses that feeling of powerlessness and precarity when confronted with an accelerated process of profound political, environmental and technological change. Making love with the things I hate interrogates this paradigm shift and acts as a catalyst of personal resistance.
Garrido adopts the visual language of both Dadaist and digital collage, which divides the exhibition into three interwoven thematics: the hegemony of masculine power in politics, the inexorable ubiquity of plastics, and exponential advances in technology. The entire gallery becomes a collage, with the sculptural installations as its composite parts. Sculptural details relay Garrido’s personal experience navigating Spanish and British bureaucracy and expose a sense of ambivalence towards events and conditions that seem beyond our control.
The colourful pixelated caricatures of Spanish politicians in Don’t Get Ill dilutes their power to stereotypical personas in a confrontation with demonstrations of state violence and their ability to blame and cause suffering to citizens. These mini-collages sit alongside (Almost Empty) Plastic Bottles of Whatever’s, a series of floral still-lives that penetrate through plastic cleaning products. These objects are translated from physical pieces to digital image; the resulting hybrid figures fuse the natural and industrial. The plexiglass pedestal of Thanks for that Apple places a more ironic question mark behind our dependency on machines despite their rapid obsolescence in an increasingly digitised world.
Text written by curator Gema Darbo in 2017 for MLWTTIH solo exhibition at Deptford X