I’ve known Zazou Roddam for almost a decade, long before Roddam considered herself an artist or I was curating. For years, we’ve run into each other at the Portobello Road Market, a Friday mecca for Londoners searching for forgotten and unloved relics. These chance encounters were no doubt a harbinger of Roddam’s attraction to history’s detritus, manifesting in her debut solo exhibition “POP INFLECTION” at Brunette Coleman in 2023. The gallery’s founders, Ted Targett and Anna Eaves, set up shop that same year, joining a community of young galleries in London’s Bloomsbury and fast becoming known for the razor-sharp rigor with which they approach their program. In January, Brunette Coleman (in partnership with New York’s Francis Irv) opened their Condo presentation: showing new works by Roddam and Rachel Fäth.
Foundational to Roddam’s “POP INFLECTION” was her video Pop Inflection (The City) (2022–23), for which she meticulously spliced together shots from the cult HBO show Sex and the City depicting the New York skyline – no sex, all city. The television series ran from 1998 to 2004, years of cataclysmic change for America. The period began with Bill Clinton’s infamous denial — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky” (very SATC!) — and ended in the shadow of 9/11, when the world changed forever. These changing tides are palpable in Roddam’s video, as sweeping aerial shots of bulging NY cityscapes — synonymous with the early seasons of the show — mutate into tight and architecturally-homogenized close-ups, as if the camera is afraid of the construction that birthed the series. Roddam reveals to me that one specific clip around the four-minute mark — autumn leaves falling in slow motion — was lifted directly from the fourth season’s “I Heart NY” episode, a post-9/11 tribute to New York, after which the Empire State Building replaced the Twin Towers in the show’s opening credits. The only element of the video work not original to Sex and the City is a score by composer Luca Mantero: the pulsing of electronics, constant in tempo but changing in pitch and tone, keeps pace across the film, edging us toward a crescendo that never comes. Mantero composed the score in two distinct parts — before the falling leaves and after — from field recordings gathered in different cities. He drew inspiration from New York’s much-loved minimalist composers — Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson for example — whose works became most prominent in the years leading up to Sex and the City. Pop Inflection (The City) serves as a sort of archive of New York City, allowing the viewer to trace–with a degree of anxiety–the passage of time through our own consciousness of world events. Even the fictional world of SATC was forced to acknowledge changing realities: a call and response between the fantasy of pop culture and the bleak realities of real life at the time.
Roddam applies similar methodologies to physical objects as she does her meticulous collecting and splicing of B-roll for Pop Inflection (The City). Synchronous Tower (2023) comprises a patchwork of leathers repurposed from abandoned office chairs found on the streets of London and New York. These black leather chairs, worn-out from daily use in workplaces, were abraded to the point of obsolescence and subsequent disposal, only for Roddam to collect and strip them of their dilapidated upholstery. The material is stretched and stitched together to form three unbroken hides which, hung in order of size, take the shape of a rudimentary high-rise. Roddam views these reclaimed leathers in the same way an antiquarian might regard an antique’s patina as an important signifier of an object’s life lived. In the case of Synchronous Tower, it was the sitting, standing, and shifting in one’s seat that were the eventual cause of these abrasions and tears — a record not only of the passage of time but also the choreography of daily life.
An underground parking garage near London’s Liverpool Street serves as the point of departure for Roddam’s recent Brunette Coleman Condo presentation. Construction of the car park in question began in 1957 and, during excavations, a section of the London Wall was uncovered. The wall was built by the Romans between 190 AD and 225 AD, and demarcated London’s boundaries well into the medieval period. Much of the unearthed wall was destroyed, but a fragment was preserved and can be seen in lot 52 of the appropriately-named London Wall Car Park. In 2023 the City of London inexplicably entombed the Roman ramparts inside a glass box and it was this gratuitous museumification of history that drew Roddam to the site. A pair of her Polaroids, Lot 52 (2) (2025), provide a visual record of the oversized fish tank, focusing loosely on two inexplicable holes in the glass facade. For Roddam, the redundancy of these holes instills chaos in order: a chink in the armor of the systems that govern cities and, by extension, determine how history and culture exist in relation to daily life. The “space in-between” the ruins and glass seeps out through these holes, crossing the threshold between Lot 52 as a conserved cultural monument and the utility of the car park. In Lot 52 (2), and across her practice, Roddam interrogates the authority of preservation: why we choose to protect something and who decides what is protected. Historic England, the governmental organization that maintains the wall, describes their role as “a public body that helps people care for, enjoy, and celebrate England’s spectacular historic environment,” but their role isn’t exclusive to care alone. They also function as judge, jury, and executioner for the less “spectacular historic environments.” The wall’s listing on the Historic England website reads, “the monument was deliberately preserved as a particularly fine portion of the Wall.” Historic England presumably considered the other fifty-plus meters of excavated wall to be inferior and therefore dispensable.
For Lot 2454 / Lot 5152 (2024–25) — also exhibited at Condo — Roddam sourced crystal door handles and their brass mechanisms from a Harlem reclamation yard, and later, from eBay. These roughly hewn sections of door furniture are stacked with no fixative and encased in pristine acrylic boxes. Only their faceted glass doorknobs protrude through perfectly circular openings (a direct reference to the holes in Lot 52’s glass facade). The door segments aren’t traditional objects of desire, but the antique cut-glass handles did conflate functionality and fashion at the time they were made.
In 1896, American architect and “father of skyscrapers” Louis Sullivan coined the maxim “form follows function,” a design principle proposing that the appearance of buildings and objects should relate to their intended purpose. In the early twentieth century, Austrian architect Albert Loos expanded on Sullivan’s principles, giving the lecture “Ornament and Crime” (1908), which argued that decoration or ornament had no place in functional design. To me (and with the added benefit of hindsight), Roddam’s glass handles float in a kind of purgatory within the context of Sullivan’s and Loos’s principles. Yes, they were fundamentally designed to open a door, but in 1900, around the time when these handles were made, America was emerging as a global superpower and birthing a prosperous middle class. A door stood as both a gateway to the home and a preliminary declaration of class and taste. A shimmering jewel for a door handle might say something about the person inside, and I’d argue that this statement was itself an extension of its functionality. Loos wrote, “Ornamented plates are very expensive, whereas the white crockery from which the modern man likes to eat is cheap. The one accumulates savings, the other debts.” While Loos might be right that his idea of “modern man” might use plain white (IKEA?!) crockery, his arguments disregard the perception of quality associated with ornament. Roddam’s faceted glass handles only exist because they were deemed worth saving. The rest of the doors did not survive.
Roddam’s cleaved segments are divorced from the possibly glamorous context in which they once lived and, as individual objects, might well appear destitute if not for the artist’s intervention in their fate. Grouped together into precarious totems and encased in pristine plexiglass cases, they glisten once again. Roddam speaks about attempting to achieve a feeling of impermanence and a sense of awkwardness within her sculptures. Walking the streets of cities she calls home, Roddam pays particular attention to accumulations of disregarded objects. She explains that the lack of care employed when people throw out unwanted objects leaves a particular type of negative ‘in-between’ space: a randomness or lack of order that she is drawn to when thinking about her own compositions in a gallery setting. For me, this attempt at formal unease is most successful in Lot 2454 / Lot 5152, in which each handle protrudes through its clear perforated box at a different angle or height. Nothing is centered; some handles touch the plexiglass. I want to set them straight as I would a crooked picture frame. These irregularities disrupt the icy perfection or splendid nullness of the cases that contain them.
Objects that require a bodily choreography to function — action objects — are a focal point for Roddam’s recent collecting proclivities. Desert Rose (2024–25) comprises an assemblage of aluminium fans, a doorbell transformer, and its respective bell. Whenever a doorbell rings, a rehearsed choreography begins: perhaps we throw on clothes, run downstairs, or unlock a deadbolt. Similarly, turning on a fan on a hot day might cause an unconsciousness migration into the path of moving air. Office chairs, door mechanisms, doorbells, fans: these are objects that become worn out through the choreography of daily use and, as such, objects that you might easily find broken and discarded.
Roddam’s works are not necessarily durational (in conception, they can be quite abrupt), but they are grounded in time. Pop culture becomes a chronicle for a period in history. An antiquated object, no longer usable, serves as a record of circulation or utility. Roddam assumes a role of civic archivist and/or architectural conservator in her collecting of materials. Yet, an archivist’s job is to sort information in compliance with systems, methodologies, and procedures. Roddam isn’t bound by such ordinances, instead following intuition and feeling to determine an object’s importance. She edits and condenses in order to zoom in on microcosms of culture and history, a process that gives an accusatory prod to hazy value systems and methods of rarifying used to determine (or perform) cultural significance.
