Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby, 'Contact (The Kiss)'. Images courtesy of the artists and Xxjira Hii.
Dr Larne Abse Gogarty w/ Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby
The conversation between artists Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby and Dr Larne Abse Gogarty (Associate Professor and Head of History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art) explored the duo’s new series of works for their exhibition Inner Heat, at CCA. The six drawings that make up the series Contact, are central to the exhibition. Here, digital images have been translated painstakingly into pencil drawings. Decontextualized from the social media feeds where they were found, each can be read as deviant, tracing gender fluidity, non-normative sexual practices, or anthropomorphic transformation. One set of images shows figures stuck in mud, a literal metaphor for the stickiness and muddiness of the images that hold Majid and Newby’s attention. Issues of how we live amongst distributed images, and ideas of secrecy and exposure were explored by the speakers, in light of Dr Abse Gogarty’s recent publication, What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and Antimonies of Conspiracy (2023, Sternberg).
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BIOGRAPHY
Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She is an Associate Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Larne is the author of What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill, 2022) and has published in journals and magazines including Art Monthly, New Socialist, Tate Papers, Third Text, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and written catalogue essays for artists including Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, and Gray Wielebinski. In 2020 she co-edited with Andrew Hemingway a special issue on “Keywords for Marxist Art History” of the journal Kunst und Politik.
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