dinosaurkilby

Collective Hecatomb Decline Conjecture

Adam Grainger
03.02.23 - 25.03.23

By Appointment Only

Curated by Alice Reed and Dinosaur Kilby.

I invited Alice Reed to curate a show at Cheap Cheap. She chose Adam. Adam is an artist-curator.

He runs Forth.

I was at Michael House, having a studio visit with Dudley and I saw a piece by Adam on the wall in one of the corridors, ‘Goal Oriented (Black Dog),’ 2022. It features a greyhound on a race track. The dog is muzzled, but it’s snarling, teeth bared. He’s wearing a red jersey with a large, white number 1. I have a greyhound, she’s called Spider, she used to race in Brighton. She now sleeps on my sofa, most of the day, everyday.

Adam says he’s interested in collectivity, catastrophe and nihilism. I think he’s interested in climate change. Adam is doing a similar thing to me, there is a kinship in our contrasting practices.

Collectivity is hard.

Plasterboard is a brittle, often hidden material, a medium that puts the work in, but can and will snap.

When it’s edged in metal however, these wall works become synergistic. Funerary plaques that diagrammatize collective practice. Utopia is searched for and missed, ending in the abyss, but with the potential of a shared vision?

These works are goth, nihilistic, religious, bleak, utopic, grim, depressing, pretentious. These are Totemic works for Totemic Times.

There’s a bolt through my head. There’s a BOLT through MY head. How long has that been there?

‘I can’t go on, I will go on.’ This is fucked. There are no answers here. The black dog here is not depression, I think that’s too simplistic, the outcomes exhausted, collectivity’s fucked, neoliberalism has stripped us of our resourcefullness.

This is art for the cynics.

— Dinosaur Kilby

Adam Grainger (b.1996, UK) is a curator, artist, and organiser living and working at the former Michael House School, an ex-Steiner School turned Artist Commune. He currently runs Forth, a Nottingham based gallery space. In his frequently collaborative practice, he has co-founded collective curatorial projects Four/Four and Whorling.net, was studio manager at One Thoresby Street, and a member of DARP. He is also part of the 22/23 cohort of alternative education project School of the Damned.

Dear Adam,

I’m writing this letter as a sort of full-disclosure-cum-curatorial-text, both as a semi-ironic take on the open letter format and an utterly sincere, heartfelt love letter to you. It’ll be nice to have this all out in the open, while still remaining somewhat private as a ‘curatorial text’ that (pretty much) no one will fully read. Still, I hope it’s an enjoyable read to you and whoever else might be bored enough to look it over.

It’s hard to know how these things take shape from the outside-in, but there’s definitely a degree of nepotism in this case. When Dinosaur (Kilby) asked me to consider co-curating a solo show at his space, Cheap Cheap, I (internally) laughed it off. You’re the only person I could really think to approach in this way and something in my brain made me hold back from asking. When I eventually asked, I was so glad you were interested 一 I’ve always loved your work.

I have a relatively professional relationship with Kilby, the friendship stemming from our interrelating art practices (which by no means is to suggest that I see Kilby as anything less than a friend), but you and I relate on a different level. Of course, the friendship comes from you recruiting me at Four/Four, as it was then known, though it’s spiralled past that now. You’re a friend, foremost, and artist-curator-collaborator-mentor, second. I wouldn’t have asked you to take on this project if I didn’t wholeheartedly see you in this way. And that is how this exhibition has come about.

In our early conversations, I was pleased to see the context of this exhibition veer towards a criticism of communal practice (though ‘criticism’ may feel a bit of a strong term to use, here).1 I thought I was just being a cynic before you and Kilby affirmed my thoughts with your own doubts around the utopianism of communal practice as it is so often performed. That said, I have rarely engaged in communal practice and, when I have stepped in, my experience has been largely positive. Yet, as I’m certain you agree, contradiction is a gift and cynicism is fun. These things can be difficult to universalise, particularly when they are often somewhat insular. Either way, I much prefer to throw myself into negativity 一 it’s more enjoyable.

Your work makes me feel like I’ve just walked past a car crash, half an hour post-impact. It’s exciting to see the remnants of a maiming, particularly when the gore is minimal and abjection is distanced. There’s this feeling you get, seeing something like that, where you just can’t look away. Maybe exciting sounds like the wrong word, but the others that come to mind would certainly be too far. Your work exists along this same vein, showing hints of a threat that are so distanced from your own flesh and blood they begin to feel fictitious, softer and more abstract.

The actual pieces involved in this exhibition show a shared aesthetic preference of ours: animals in violence. Hecatomb, the sacrifice of one hundred oxen, couldn’t be a more apt term to include in the title of this exhibition considering its focus on collective-immolation. The word certainly helps disavow any victim narrative that may be inferred by others viewing your work, instead showing that this masochism is a shared and unanticipated one. Still, this preference for violence in each image is an unnerving one. It can be hard to look at these things, but in their newly sterile space within your work they look so tranquil, like pieces of shattered windscreen on the slip lane.

With the exhibition, full title: Collective Hecatomb Decline Conjecture, now here, I hope my appreciation of your collaboration and practice doesn’t come off too ironic. The opportunity to give back to you what you have given to me over our years of familiarity has been an invaluable one. To any readers beyond Adam, I can imagine how self-indulgent this letter may appear, so I thank you for getting this far. This isn’t to say that it’s not an act of self-indulgence, but there is a sincerity here that I am happy has been shared. I didn’t intend for this letter to explain or justify Adam’s work any more than it provides a context for my presence in and appreciation of the exhibition, with the necessary level of transparency required for such an examination of communal practice. I can only hope that has been achieved.

All my love,

Alice

1. In this context, communal practice is not to mean the bonds created between communities of people that have come together with the intention of uplifting one another or attaining socio/political goals through the creative arts, united by their heritage, culture, ideology, or otherwise. Rather, it is to mean a form of artistic practice dependent upon the creation of a micro-community, not necessarily focused on any end goal or wider mission. This is not an inherently bad thing, so much as it is an inherently good thing.

This website uses cookies.