“I Spend a Lot of Time Looking at People’s Depressing Dinners”

[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]N[/dropcap]ew London gallery Elephant West will open on 10 November with a show by British photographer Maisie Cousins, her largest to date. Dipping Sauce will be the first in a series of shows given over to emerging artists. But rather than traditional exhibitions, artists will create installations that transform the space into a new environment each time, says the artistic director Robert Shore.

Maisie Cousins

The decision from the team behind the visual culture magazine Elephant to open a gallery was made as a way of bringing “the magazine to life”, Shore says. Although the magazine “has always been visually led, [opening a space] allows us to look at work that goes beyond the page,” he adds. The gallery is in an old petrol station in west London, which has been renovated by the architectural studio Liddicoat & Goldhill.

The inaugural show will see Cousins cover the walls of the space with a specially commissioned body of work. The close-up visceral photographs, in her signature glossy and saturated style, explore people’s relationship with food and how they share it on social media. “I spend a lot of time on Instagram looking at people’s depressing dinners‚” Cousins says in a press statement.

Cousins was picked for the inaugural show as she “is at a critical point in her career and we felt we could have real impact by commissioning a body of new work for a large space,” says the head curator Becca Pelly-Fry.

Source: The Art Newspaper

Image: Marcos Alonso

Naila Scargill

Naila Scargill is the publisher and editor of horror journal Exquisite Terror. Holding a broad editorial background, she has worked with an eclectic variety of content, ranging from film and the counterculture, to political news and finance.

www.exquisiteterror.com