Exhibition
16.09 – 07.10.23
Warehouse
Preview and Edition Launch
Saturday 16th September, 6 – 8pm
Screening starts at 7pm
Open
Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm
Please join us on Saturday 16th September in the warehouse for the Glasgow premiere of False Wife and the launch of a new edition ‘False Wife Comments’ by Jamie Crewe, plus an in conversation with programmer and writer Myriam Mouflih.
The film will also be screened on a loop in the warehouse for the following three weeks during regular exhibition hours, Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm.
False Wife is a poppers training video that leads its visitors through an ordeal of transformation. A poppers training video is typically a user-made compilation of pornographic clips, uploaded to adult video hosting sites. These clips are paired with text, hypnotic music, voiceovers, and instructions for action. Viewers are told to masturbate and sniff poppers, to let imagery and sensation meld and reach a gooning ecstatic fervour.
False Wife is a poppers training video, but its material is obscure. Its narrative is drawn from a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs, and relationships happen. Its footage is scavenged from sources that reflect these themes, reduced to slivers of significant imagery, rubbed together. These originating sources are warped or inflamed to say ambiguous things: to discuss desire, shame, transgression, and the longing for change, and the various ways we want — and don’t want — to face them.
False Wife was commissioned by The University of Edinburgh Art Collection and Dr Chloë Kennedy of Edinburgh Law School, and funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leader Fellowship grant (AH/S013180/1).
‘False Wife Comments’ is a new edition — a brickish book that presents text taken from ‘False Wife’ (local website and poppers training video, 2022) alongside newly-written commentary and a new drawing of a bòcan. ‘False Wife’ uses text and automated voice to deliver a narrative of guilt, arousal and transformation at breathless speed. ‘False Wife Comments’ presents the same narrative for different reading, with added digressions: certain phrases, references and implications are expanded upon, blooming into clarity or retreating into dankness. Where ‘False Wife’ was an ordeal, ‘False Wife Comments’ is a rumination: it is pendulous with commentary, fixated upon, and pressed to the nose for its precious and fading redolences — like Mark’s jumper.
The first 20 editions are available for £180 each plus postage and packaging– email jamiecrewestudio(at)gmail(dot)com to order.
708 pages, 104mm x 147mm x 42mm. Produced in an edition of 40, plus artist’s proofs. Printed by The Holodeck, Birmingham. Commissioned by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection.
Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte’s head. They make artworks with video, text, installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and more. These works think about constriction: the way people are formed by their cultures, environments and relationships, and the things that herniate from them as a consequence.
Jamie’s solo exhibitions include Ashley at LUX Moving Image, London (2020); Solidarity & Love at Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2020); Love & Solidarity at Grand Union, Birmingham (2020); Pastoral Drama at Tramway, Glasgow (2018); Female Executioner at Gasworks, London (2017); and But what was most awful was a girl who was singing at Transmission, Glasgow (2016).
In April 2022 Jamie released False Wife (2022), a website and video commissioned by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection and Dr Chloë Kennedy of Edinburgh Law School, which received the EMAF Award for groundbreaking work in media art at the 35th European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Germany. She received the Margaret Tait Award in 2019, a Turner Bursary in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2022.
Image: False Wife [still], Jamie Crewe, 2022.