This September, Georgia Gardner Gray presents “NDE”, an exhibition of new works, spanning painting, sculpture and theatre – marking her first solo presentation in the United Kingdom. Referring to the phenomenon of a “Near Death Experience”, her tableau recalibrates the simulacra of modernity alongside supernatural elements, to evoke a shifting paradigm away from fetishized objects and disembodied moods – to immanent rapture. The body of work centres on an exploration of the everyday incidents, labours and archetypes that constitute life now; pursuing an open-ended narrative composed by ubiquitous consumer products, stock imagery, somatic and psychological states, marked by brief memetic punchlines. Through these scenographies Gardner Gray attempts to probe our system of belief, staging pert encounters with the binary symbols that we read: seedy, respectable, educated, uneducated, subversive, conformist, real, imaginary, etc. She reveals the pervasive social maps for passing temporal judgement.
The eponymously titled play NDE (Near Death Experience) opens with the near death of a wounded soldier in an unspecified future World War. He finds himself in an out-of-body experience, traveling through scenes of his brief life. Puncturing the rhapsodic, the highfalutin themes commingle with the petty micro aggressions of everyday modern life.
The first performance of NDE will take place during the opening, on Thursday 08 September, at 7 pm, with further performances at the gallery during Frieze Week, on Monday 10 October at 6 pm and Tuesday 11 October at 12 pm. The runtime of the performance is 45 minutes.
