MAKING LOVE WITH THE THINGS I HATE

ALMOST EMPTY PLAST

I

C BOTTLES OF WHATEVER

MAKING

LOVE WITH

I

MAKING

HATE

THE THINGS

LOVE WITH

I

THE THINGS

EMPTY PLASTIC BOTTLES OF WHATEVER

Thanks for that apple

don't get ill

do

you know what

I

mean?

do

you know what

I

mean?

do you know whatI mean?

fuck

t h e m

¡Que se jodan!(fuck them)

¡Que se jodan!

(fuck them)

don't get ill

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