Enduring circumstances

Pedley, J. and Petridis, P. and Siopis, P. (2022) Enduring circumstances. [Show/Exhibition]

Abstract

Enduring Circumstances presented newly commissioned films by Jennie Pedley, Paris Petridis and Penny Siopis, 26 September - 21 November 2022. Crises have the quality of urgency. But their causes may be of longer duration, and strategies for survival slower and steadier. Enduring Circumstances brings together three artworks responding to the social effects of crisis. Using the durational qualities of video, these works address the cataclysm of the pandemic to ask: what is the interaction between human health and habitat? How does the representation of daily rituals offer deep reflection on the passing of time and being in the world? How might art interrogate the basis of long-standing patterns of harm? Contemporary artists Jennie Pedley, Paris Petridis, and Penny Siopis each turn their attention to these questions in works that engage with the material of the body, remediate everyday experience, and investigate the archival traces of social relationships. Originally commissioned as part of Peltz Gallery's Lessons from Lockdown: Learning from the Pandemic (2020-21). nudity I was interested to note the passing of my generation: two years ago every second man had a wound mark, but I did not see one today.' As the 1930s sunbathing craze took hold, the riverbank was quadrupled in size to make way for more reclining bodies, and a family equivalent opened next door, called Dame's Delight. Then, in the Second World War, the site again reconfigured itself, with soldiers posted in Oxford gaining leave to bathe there in their time-off. By the postwar period Parson's Pleasure was known as a cruising spot, featuring as a 'swimming place' in the 1962 edition of the Guide Gris, an early gay travel guide. Parson's Pleasure was demolished and a bonfire made of its sheds and screens in January 1992. Duncan Montgomery's new series of wood engravings and the contextual material provided here by George Townsend represent work in progress in a project to illustrate and enrich the findings of Townsend's recent doctoral thesis, A Cultural History of Parson's Pleasure (2022).

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