Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake

Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake
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Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake
27th June, 2024 – 3rd August, 2024
South Parade
Griffin House
79 Saffron Hill
London
SE5 7TT

South Parade presents two new exhibitions for their Summer programme: The World Awake, a new exhibition by Garrett Lockhart, as well as a dual-gallery collaboration with CYLINDER (Seoul, South Korea), presenting paintings by Jonghwan Lee and sculpture by Aidan Duffy.

Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake Installation view

Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake is the artist’s first exhibition in London. Lockhart is often searching for an expanded, metaphysical sense of home. For their show at South Parade, the artist finds home in the stars, the lit windows of strangers, and a crackling fire. The World Awake presents a collection of sculpture, assemblage, and a video work, utilising the gallery and adjacent storage room to examine dwelling as an embodied practice of memory, time, and displacement.

Lockhart shares a new series of inkjet transfer ‘starweeds’, a continued motif in the artist’s practice — star-shaped rosette weeds that typically grow near open roadsides, stockyards, undeveloped areas and arid pastures. Here, as a starry sky, the starweeds enter the space as shifting forms that simultaneously anchor and spread, shining as lights in the abyss. They are a constellation we might gaze up at to get lost for a moment, or use to find our way.

Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake
Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake Installation view

Attention then shifts from skywards to the ground, with a series of reclaimed paper shopping bags and found objects that inherently transform the scale of the room. The bags are branded but obscured, reflective of the home and body bound to capitalism, to the continuously moving patterns of contemporary pedestrian living. Starched and painted to retain stiffness, the bags collectively stand like houses or buildings, small clusters or ‘neighbourhoods.’ The bags are fittingly Konnyaku-treated – a Japanese method of strengthening paper for walls and clothing – a considered connection materially and conceptually to architecture, to sites of dwelling. Each small ‘apartment building’ stands characterised with two or three ‘windows’ —photographs — stitched in.

Garrett Lockhart: The World Awake opens on the 27th of June, 2024 until the 3rd of August, 2024 at South Parade

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