Real Time by Amie Corry. Celia Hempton at Southard Reid/London/UK
Courtesy the artist and Southard Reid, London
Photography, Susan Sontag wrote in 1977, risks reducing the world to ‘a series of unrelated, free-standing particles’, the camera making reality, ‘atomic, manageable, and opaque’.
It is hard to imagine a period of image-production (and dependence) more suited to Sontag’s description of ‘free-standing particles’ than our own, strange moment. But it is precisely the unmanageability of this splintered condition, the combination of the hyperspecific and unknowable, that we struggle to negotiate without moral panic.
Celia Hempton makes paintings about fragmentary states, and while some of this recent body of work pre-dates COVID, the installation prods at one of the pandemic’s most disorientating effects: how disembodied spatial experience has become.
The paintings are uniform in scale and roughly correspond, it immediately occurs, to the size of laptop screens. Drifting in and out of intelligibility, Hempton’s subjects range from men encountered in chat rooms to the chance landscape of surveillance: images taken from CCTV footage posted publicly online. The latter include a reclining cat (or perhaps grazing cow), lucid green swimming pool, church interior, and skyscrapers against purple-hued sky through fisheye lens. Elsewhere in the exhibition, faces emerge from wet impasto peaks while a masturbating man is rendered in harried blue sweeps, the speed of the composition determined by the fleeting interaction between artist and sitter. And then there is an exquisite, hot-pink baby, plump-limbed and happy.
We seem increasingly resigned to the fact that algorithms present each and every one of us with a personalised version of reality: we date, vote, shop, wank and proselytize within self-perpetuating echo chambers. And while we might decry the flatness and fickleness of the screen, few are in a position to reject it.
Hempton’s screen-sized paintings are presented within their own, subjective prism: Southard Reid’s white cube space becomes crude citadel of the artist’s making, the paintings set amid fortress-like constructions daubed in messy strokes of diluted colour. This naïve intervention is typical of Hempton. Here, she assumes control of the room and fills it with portraits of spaces where her agency is in question.
The snatched CCTV encounters, taken from the website Insecam, are ambiguous in composition but rooted in locational specificity. We learn from the paintings’ titles that the cat (or cow) reclined in Tokyo on 18th September 2019, and that the day before, the sky read as lilac against grey towers in Acapulco. They are nonrational convergences, experienced by Hempton at an extreme distance, through the rectangle of the screen. We cannot really know how abstracted the paintings are, or how good the connection was. Just as the artist cannot know if the footage occurred in real time, or where Insecam says it did.
The sole self-portrait in the show is a blood-red vulva. It is a beautiful, deft work: each lip staked out in the lightest of strokes around feathered tips of labia that span the height of the canvas. In this context, the self-portrait suggests that we are, on the one hand, made up of parts, perfectly suited to the crop of a screen, while on the other, we are a teaming mass of rhizomatic vessels, experience and guts. And maybe, beyond the polarized frameworks of online/offline, risk/safety, the two are not mutually exclusive.
The same discursive urge runs through Hempton’s Chat Random series (2014–ongoing), in which she paints, at necessarily highspeed, a rolodex of mostly masturbating men (the chat room filters according to the binary categories of man, woman or couple) from around the world. The compositions are decided by the position of the sitter’s webcam – in France, 27th May 2020, the figure’s head is cropped out, leaving only square chest, crotch, fist and thighs.
The paintings present the men as they present themselves: variously tentative or dominant, anonymous or posturing. Some are there to be seen, some to watch or talk, most to get off through one, other, or a combination of these. The series relays how unfixed models of power dynamics are in this context. Voyeurism implies transgression: the disregard for another person’s desire for privacy or solitude and that disregard being the source of pleasure. The relationship here is reciprocal but complicated. In choosing to use only fragments, Hempton pulls at the seams of masculinity’s policed imperatives, exposing how fragile the performance of it is.
Agency, self-representation, body/screen, touch/swipe: taken as a whole, the installation suggests how chimeric these realms are.
Courtesy the artist and Southard Reid, London
France, 27th May 2020, Oil on linen 30 x 35 cm, Courtesy the artist and Southard Reid, London
Courtesy the artist and Southard Reid, London
Self Portrait 7th October 2019, Oil on gesso panel, 40 x 35 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Southard Reid,