Suspicion: narrative painting at the Jerwood Space

Mary Mercer wanted to be ‘spellbound’ by the painting at Suspicion. Instead she found some ‘rich and strange’ work which was let down by a boringly conventional hang.

Kate Lyddon, Man Vs Wheel Vs Woman Vs Beast, 2014, 

oil, acrylic and collage on canvas, 150x120cm (x2)

The Suspicion show at the Jerwood Space was something that I wanted to see. The title which could have come from the Elvis song but just as satisfyingly comes from the Hitchcock film, had been trailed by some tempting images – shiny marble heads by Damien Meade and weeping Victorian ladies by Simon Linke. It was probably always going to be hard to live up to this expectation.

Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street at Space

Excavated for your viewing pleasure – works from the seminal semiotext(e) event. Presented alongside contemporary responses to the thematics of societal control, penal discipline and anti-psychiatry. Alicia Rodriguez investigates.

In 1975, an early incarnation of the Semiotext(e) group organised an event that brought together counter-cultural icons and philosophers to engage in discussion surrounding anti-psychiatry, societal control and penal discipline.

Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Madness included contributions from Michel Foucault, John Cage, R.D. Laing and William S. Burroughs. Addressing a number of socio-political issues, the event itself has achieved near mythical status in Semiotext(e)’s archive and has informed generations of creative, critical thinking.

This archive is excavated for a new project titled Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street, which takes place at SPACE in Hackney, alongside a selection of new works commissioned as a response to the original, seminal event.