Conditional Love is Jame St Findlay’s first solo exhibition in London. Presented in the street-facing windows and interior gallery space, it comprises new commissioned photographic works and a film featuring a voiceover performed by Berlin-based artist Bully Fae Collins.
The exhibition was prompted by the acquisition of a doll’s house, which Findlay’s film Conditional Love is shot within. Playing with the doll’s house as a set, or a site, where someone could live, Findlay started to think about the misery of the generic sad family life that might inhabit this newbuild home with no doors or corridors. It reminded him of a dream he’d had about architectural plans for houses that were so unlivable they seemed to demand your own death.
Empty apart from a wooden bench, we encounter the house in fish-eye shots that linger upon miniature embossed wallpaper, parquet floors and the house’s curved Dutch gable-style facade. These are accompanied by the monologue of a nameless and melancholy father of two, whose discomfort with this identity – ‘I always saw myself as an end point, a full stop ’– is reflected in the inertia of the two-storey building, which, he explains, has no stairs.
The man in the house describes himself as “Saturday’s Child... flesh in the room, a body at a desk”. He is the latest iteration of a recurring motif in Findlay’s work: the ‘nameless heterosexual male’ in APEX PREDATOR (2019), or suited business man appearing across moving image works including Death Knell (2022). This cast of outcasts shelter in dens in wooded landscapes, roam office corridors with green painted faces, prod holes in the snow with a long prosthetic nose.
Whilst Conditional Love (the film) is entirely confined to the doll’s house, large scale photographic blinds drawn shut in the gallery and illuminated in the street-facing windows depict office furniture flickering in and out of focus on a wet and muscular tongue. The voiceover in the film conjures a lonely figure, stunted in, or freed from, the constricting expectations of reproductive masculinity. The blinds suggest a body caught between the grinding status quo and a return to sensuality.
(1) Furnished Interior 1–3, Installation View, 2022
(2) Furnished Interior 1–2, Installation View, 2022
(3) Furnished Interior 3, Installation View, 2022
(4) Conditional Love, Installation View, 2022
(5) Conditional Love, Film Still, 2022
(6) Conditional Love, Installation View, 2022
(7) Conditional Love, Film Still, 2022
(8) Conditional Love, Film Still, 2022
(9) Conditional Love, Installation View, 2022
(10) Conditional Love, Film Still, 2022
(11) Conditional Love, Film Still, 2022
(12) Conditional Love, Film Still, 2022
Courtesy of the artist.
Images: Anne Tetzlaff
Conditional Love is Jame St Findlay’s first solo exhibition in London. Presented in the street-facing windows and interior gallery space, it comprises new commissioned photographic works and a film featuring a voiceover performed by Berlin-based artist Bully Fae Collins.
The exhibition was prompted by the acquisition of a doll’s house, which Findlay’s film Conditional Love is shot within. Playing with the doll’s house as a set, or a site, where someone could live, Findlay started to think about the misery of the generic sad family life that might inhabit this newbuild home with no doors or corridors. It reminded him of a dream he’d had about architectural plans for houses that were so unlivable they seemed to demand your own death.
Empty apart from a wooden bench, we encounter the house in fish-eye shots that linger upon miniature embossed wallpaper, parquet floors and the house’s curved Dutch gable-style facade. These are accompanied by the monologue of a nameless and melancholy father of two, whose discomfort with this identity – ‘I always saw myself as an end point, a full stop ’– is reflected in the inertia of the two-storey building, which, he explains, has no stairs.
The man in the house describes himself as “Saturday’s Child... flesh in the room, a body at a desk”. He is the latest iteration of a recurring motif in Findlay’s work: the ‘nameless heterosexual male’ in APEX PREDATOR (2019), or suited business man appearing across moving image works including Death Knell (2022). This cast of outcasts shelter in dens in wooded landscapes, roam office corridors with green painted faces, prod holes in the snow with a long prosthetic nose.
Whilst Conditional Love (the film) is entirely confined to the doll’s house, large scale photographic blinds drawn shut in the gallery and illuminated in the street-facing windows depict office furniture flickering in and out of focus on a wet and muscular tongue. The voiceover in the film conjures a lonely figure, stunted in, or freed from, the constricting expectations of reproductive masculinity. The blinds suggest a body caught between the grinding status quo and a return to sensuality.
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