Liquid Language

Curated by David Liss

OPENING

Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto is pleased to present Liquid Language, the first exhibition in Toronto by London, U.K. artist Hannah Perry.

Hannah Perry is gaining international acclaim for her complex media installations that incorporate video, sound, performance, and wall-mounted works that probe the interconnectedness of deep emotion and bodily experience.

Using dissonant imagery, fragmented narrative and immersive, sensorial environments, Perry considers the unsettling nature of our times. Often her works respond to personal circumstances that consider the visceral impact of pain, loss, mental health and our shared experience of living in a hyper-accelerated, technologically dominated world. Creating, adopting and assembling imagery from her own life, advertising, and various subcultures, she references personal and collective memories to build a portrait of contemporary consciousness.

The exhibition features her massive sound sculpture, Rage Fluids (2018), which is a series of curved auto-body wrap panels suspended from the ceiling, whose shiny, mirrored and pulsating surfaces, activated by low frequency, deep rumbling subwoofers, reflect fragmented and distorted images of viewers and their surroundings. Caught in the midst, the effect is physical, visceral even, as the body appears destabilized and dissonant, reverberating with anxiety and uncertainty. 

Exhibited alongside and related to Rage Fluids is GUSH (2018), a cinematically immersive video produced during a residency at Somerset House in London that strives to come to terms with pain, loss and mental illness. The exhibition also includes a series of Perry’s characteristic wall-mounted works produced specifically for the exhibition during a residency at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal this past month.

Hannah Perry was born 1984 in the North West of England, UK. She lives and works in London, UK. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2009 and then Royal Academy of Arts in 2014. Recent exhibitions include her solo show A Smashed Window and An Empty Room at the Kunstverein Hamburg, as well as an exhibition of Artist-in-Residence programme of the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg, Russia. Her work has been shown at Over the Influence (Los Angeles), Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal, ICA Off-Site (London), Zabludowicz Collection (London), in Private Settings: Art After the Internet (MOMA Warsaw, Poland), A sense of things (Zabludowicz Collection, London), Kicking My Game (Royal Academy of Arts, London), and Stedelijk at Trouw (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). Recent solo exhibitions include Gush (Somerset House, London) and Rage Fluids (Kuenstlerhaus, Graz, AT). Hannah Perry is represented by Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin), Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer (Vienna) and Althuis Hofland Fine Arts (Amsterdam).