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.

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Text written by curator Gema Darbo in 2017 for  MLWTTIH solo exhibition at Deptford X

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