JOANNE ROBERTSON
"CLAP TRAP"
Opening: Thursday, May 8th, 2008, 6 to 8:30 PM
The exhibition will remain open until June 14th, 2008
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM

Blow de la Barra is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Joanne Robertson.

“Such a rich tumult of surface architecture and gesticulation, where boys are more obvious than girls, but only because they’re as stupid as they are beautiful. In her new paintings, Joanne Robertson denies the bummer-ass implications of the post-abstract world, and moves freely between surface attenuation and obliteration. In her work the implicit/expected presence of subconscious narrative is exposed as the sham it has always been. These paintings are not snapshots, nor do they pretend to be slices of time. Their functional trajectory is more like to being hit in the face with a statue, then sitting down for a good cry.

Roberston’s headbirths are exquisite. She bleeds her most visionary hangover mirages, then applies layers of media static and meditative huzz. The results are multi-dimensional palimpsest collages with an external glow that displays everything you have to know.

The subject is often boys. Crumbling rock star poofters caked inside their own hair wax, heroic hippie artistes arrayed behind tortoise shell ramparts, butterballs wrestling day-glo octopi, etc. There are girls as well -- drooling on stoops or shimmering inside clouds of hot smoke -- but Roberston continuously taps on the collective male husk, trying to crack its carapace once and for all. What she hopes to find there is not necessarily obvious, but perhaps it is something like the perfect heartbeat of pornography. She might imagine it transposed to the skin of these clowns -- lattice-work tattoos of imagistic meta-text, broadcasting loose random information into all intellectual voids; like a shortwave numbers station run by Russian criminals – mysteries so explicit in their opacity they cannot be named in polite company. Then again, maybe she’s just trying to paint Terry Reid. On a good day. Long ago. With a spliff as big as a yak. But don’t ask her. She’s not talking.”

Byron Coley
Deerfield 2008

Joanne Robertson was born in Manchester in 1979. She lives and works in London. Clap Trap is Robertson’s second show at Blow de la Barra, other recent exhibitions include All Tomorrow’s Pictures, ICA, London (2007), and Off Modern with Conforte Moderne, Nice, France (2007). In 2007 she curated Hot for Teacher with Byron Coley at Nog Gallery, London. As a member of Blood ‘n’ Feathers she was nominated to Beck’s Futures 2006. She has recently published Apesma‚ a book of poems and drawings in collaboration with Pierre Cupp, and has just released her first solo album The Lighters. For the last two months she has been touring the USA and Europe. She is currently working with Tom Greenwood aka Jackie O. Motherfucker on her second poetry book Cigarettes, Nicotine and Cheese and organizing a night of performance at the ICA in June 21st.