Cally Spooner: Sweat Shame Etc.

Exhibiting performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings— Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. With artworks that feature olive oil soap, WhatsApp messages, the voice of a business, the sound of a head cold, eroding support structures, a child development theorist, a poisoning, and an oversize graph, Spooner’s work crystallizes an absurd contemporary ecosystem in which entities run the risk of managing themselves and one another to death. SWEAT SHAME ETC. surveys Spooner’s artistic output of the last ten years and includes a lecture by Spooner and newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean-Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.

Text by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris and Cally Spooner.