Project Description
Sarah Maple – Jealous Art Gallery, London October 2020
The unmissable exhibition is a ground breaking collaboration between one of the most potent and singular young voices in British art and a curator who is a loud champion of female artists and voice for anti-elitism in the arts.
British artist Sarah Maple (b. 1985) will debut a new exhibition curated by Kate Bryan, arts Broadcaster and Head of Collections for Soho House globally. Maple is recognised for her provocative work that challenges ideas around identity, religion, the artworld, feminism and freedom of expression.
Often using herself as a conduit to challenge stereotypes and normative behaviour, Maple is adept at confronting complex issues that we are all thinking about with wit, irony and a startling honesty. Maple’s own mixed religious and cultural background informs much of her work. She works across a variety of media including painting, photography, video, performance, ready-mades and collage.
Her past exhibitions have focussed on Brexit, taboo representations of Muslim women, ardent feminist themes, xenophobia, Trump and toxic masculinity.
This exhibition is a culmination of her work to date and is her sharpest and most biting presentation yet: a satire on the artworld that she both rejoices in and despairs at. The exhibition arbitrarily takes its name from the words with the highest ‘click through’ appeal and will include text-based marble works, collage, mixed media installation and video.
A key work is a ground breaking series of short films that fuse art with sitcoms. An ‘art-com’ if you will. Exploring the experience of being an artist, and a very particular outspoken artist, each film is a semi-autobiographical piece, a heightened reality that draws influence from Extras and Curb Your Enthusiasm as well as seminal artists such as Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas.
Featuring Maple’s real-life collectors and colleagues –such as David Tennant, Sonia Boyce, Will Gompertz, Nikki Bedi and the curator Kate Bryan playing a bad feminist – the fictional sitcom/video art will be a meta experience, blurring the line between fiction and reality.
In October the films will also be available to view on Sky Arts – which is now free to view and available to all. By having what is essentially video art meets sitcom available to all to view from home, Maple and Bryan aim to push the boundaries of what art can be and who it is available to.
PRESS & REVIEWS
It is a time for reckoning in the art world, where straight White men have dominated both the commercial and institutional aspects of it for centuries. Sarah Maple, born in Crawley in the UK in 1985, was compelled to address structural sexism and racism in her work even as an art student, where she noticed that female students were given less air time and respect.