Alice Morey / She Doesn’t Love, She Just Devours
5 April – 18 May, 2019
The Ryder Projects
19a Herald Street
London E2 6JT
The RYDER is pleased to present She doesn’t love, she just devours, the first solo show in the UK by artist Alice Morey. The exhibition offers insight into Morey’s ongoing experimentations with materials and processes to address the impact of ecology, tradition and digital technologies in contemporary subjectivities.
Working across installation, sculpture, painting and performance, Morey invites the audience to participate in a ritual with a special sensibility towards materials, care relationships and their political implications. In her installation Quit playing games with my heart, a fragile hanging structure holds a series of elements connected through clinical plastic tubes: pheasant hides, urine bags, a beating heart GIF. All these elements conform an uncanny live system that, when put together, brings up questions of class, feminism and power. The pheasant, historically conceived as a male hunting trophy, shifts here into a different narrative, occupying a new role as an element of this contemporary still life composition.
Unexpected encounters also occur in her paintings, where homemade yogurt and charcoal are used to depict abstract configurations of porcelain chains and containers. In her painting Puncture, the canvas is tattooed using a needle and tattoo ink, seeking to address and transgress the physicality of the canvas itself.
The porcelain chains portrayed in Puncture come forth at Unicorn Condom, holding a silk conformation containing inflated pig intestines and coloured with natural pigments and Spirulina. This strange form navigates between fantasy and reality referring a mythological character while using biological materials such as guts and seaweed.
During the opening, Morey will present her live performance Pure, consisting of the artist cooking a whole pheasant stew with handmade porcelain kitchenware that will progressively break and stain. The process will allow participants to connect to the familiarity of eating together while challenging the complexity of food and craft from a feminine perspective.
Alice Morey (1986, London) is a Berlin based artist, with a BA in Fine Art Painting from University of Brighton and currently completely a masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London. She is currently represented by Lehmann + Silva, Porto. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibition Shapes of Permanence, Lehmann +Silva, Porto (2018) and Performing states of hidden earth, Das Giftraum, Berlin (2018) duo exhibition Data_Blood, Hoxton Square, London (2019),group exhibitions; How are you Babe?, Blank 100, London (2019), Again and again, Galerie Emilia Fily, Usti nad Ladem (2018) and Elymus Repens, Bar Babette, Berlin (2018). Curator and organiser of alternative art residency,’ Countdown Grabowsee’. Past residencies include Autocenter, Berlin (2015), Silkeborg Højskole, Denmark (2015).