Middlesex Presents
Middlesex Presents
Middlesex Presents

Andi Magenheimer, Daniel Sparkes, John Greenwood:
Still Life

20-22 December 2019

Still Life: wherein, William Golding, Terry Pratchett and James Lovelock are all found to live within walking distance of one another in a beautiful West Country Vale.
The way in to the show is through a passage opened up by a noise from thirty-five minutes and six seconds into a film called Under the Skin. (Do you remember it? Have you seen it? Did you hear it?). It's the noise of Scarlett Johansson's first victim (Mr. Number One, who has been submerged for some time) eventually bursting under intense pressure. It's a kind of metallic popping which feels vascular, important, regrettable: bit sickening really brings the water out in the back of your mouth.
Perhaps it is a relative of that species of sound which attends certain configurations of trees in the mountainous regions of suspicious countries: which is said (on a windy day) to turn good hikers bad. Bad as in wild. Wild insofar as they seem to set about themselves in the most awful manner; having at their own bodily casements; rending themselves limb from limb; rearing themselves internally asunder - and so on, we are told.
The question, which EDF energy were the first to formulate so concisely, is Where do they get their energy from? What frequency of noise gives permission for such high-level abandon?
It is a question which John Locke - 336 years earlier and 965 miles south-east of this exact film - is also somehow pondering. He is sat, he is on holiday, it is unusually warm for his body and for the body of the fruit he is observing whilst recovering from a bout of popular 17th century respiratory ailment. He wonders aloud, and of the fruit's emissions:
... whether this be aer new generated or whether the springy particles of aer have, in the fruits out of which these fermenting liquors are drawn, by the artifice of nature these fermenting liquors are drawn, by the artifice of nature been pressed close together & whether fermentation does not loose these bonds & give them liberty to expand themselves again?
The big for Locke is the generation of aer new. The fruit is merely this question viewed at a certain portable scale, an exigency of holiday-problem-form. Back home, at a slightly grander scale the question addresses the origins of disease. Locke had it on good authority from his friend Robert Boyle that disease was not only air-new, but air-born, that it was generated in the depths of the earth itself - emanating out of mineshafts. Locke was sent to the Mendips to investigate but was refused entry by some suspicious employees.
Perhaps they were right to be suspicious of this man who seemed to think the earth was merely the grandest of putrid fruits: their mineshaft an incision into its rotting flesh, gassing-off in the summer sun. Yes the idea of subterranean winds seems to have been widely and enthusiastically affirmed - such gusting was considered to be precisely and formatively as old as the hills. The earth in 1621, according to Robert Burton, is full of which which ... sometimes breaking out, causeth horrible earthquakes.
This subterranean wind blows the whole was through the passage we have examined: beginning with the untimely popping of Mr. Number One; it proceeds through a certain configuration of trees to dismember a team of expert hikers; gives John Locke a cough; emanates out of various scales of rotten furring fruit; and ultimately ends up playing the earth like a cheap recorder.
In this final mode, in which the subterranean wind instrumentalists the world, we are introduced to the peculiar movement that belongs to Still Life: the internal motility and tremendous effort of stationary objects. This hidden mobility, which is also a predicament, conceals itself within the word "still" in its twofold significance as both stationary and persistent. This is what is meant, initially, by Still Life. 
Text by William Spendlove

(1) Still Life, Exhibition View, 2019

(2) Andi Magenheimer, Casualty of the Spite Garden, 2019

(3) Still Life, Exhibition View, 2019

(4) Still Life, Exhibition View, 2019

(5) John Greenwood, The Museum of Now, 2018

(6) Daniel Sparkes, Pepping the Guernic-eel, Installation View, 2019

(7) Daniel Sparkes, Pepping the Guernic-eel, 2019

Andi Magenheimer, (b. 1984) currently lives in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012 and The School of Visual Art in 2009. Awards include the Chelsea Arts Club Trust Special Projects Award, Burren Exchange, and the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts.

John Greenwood (b. 1959, Leeds) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1990, where he received the Cite Internationale Paris residency award, the Burston Award and the Midland Bank purchase award. Solo exhibitions include: Jason Rhodes Gallery, London (1995 and 1998), Galerie Helmut Pabst, Frankfurt (2000) and Europaische Zentral Galerie, Frankfurt (2002). Following a career break, recent shows have included; a solo show, ‘Being John Greenwood’ in 2014, curated by Juan Bolivar at the C+C Gallery, London and group shows in 2015, ‘Doppelganger’, No Format Gallery, London, ‘Tutti-Frutti’, Turps Gallery, London, ‘Anti-Social Realism’, Charlie Smith, London, ‘Present Tense’, Swindon Art Gallery and Museum and the ‘2nd Nanjing International Art Festival, Nanjing, China. In 2015 John; won the Bronze Award at the 2nd Nanjing International Festival.

Daniel Sparkes (b. 1980, Stroud, England), also known as Mudwig, is a self taught artist. Sparkes' recent solo and duo exhibitions include The Kudcom Catastrophe, Calm and Punk Gallery, Tokyo (2019); Woodland Reducer, Dinner Party Gallery, London (2018); The Teutonburg Pellets, Line Gallery, Stroud (2016); Yore Emmenness, Robbins & Roberts, SVA, Stroud (2014); The Smurfield Quag, Brabury & Blanchard, Sheffield (2013); About Looking at Hamburgers, Goldstein’s Gallery, London (2012).

Andi Magenheimer, Daniel Sparkes, John Greenwood:
Still Life

20-22 December 2019

Still Life: wherein, William Golding, Terry Pratchett and James Lovelock are all found to live within walking distance of one another in a beautiful West Country Vale.
The way in to the show is through a passage opened up by a noise from thirty-five minutes and six seconds into a film called Under the Skin. (Do you remember it? Have you seen it? Did you hear it?). It's the noise of Scarlett Johansson's first victim (Mr. Number One, who has been submerged for some time) eventually bursting under intense pressure. It's a kind of metallic popping which feels vascular, important, regrettable: bit sickening really brings the water out in the back of your mouth.
Perhaps it is a relative of that species of sound which attends certain configurations of trees in the mountainous regions of suspicious countries: which is said (on a windy day) to turn good hikers bad. Bad as in wild. Wild insofar as they seem to set about themselves in the most awful manner; having at their own bodily casements; rending themselves limb from limb; rearing themselves internally asunder - and so on, we are told.
The question, which EDF energy were the first to formulate so concisely, is Where do they get their energy from? What frequency of noise gives permission for such high-level abandon?
It is a question which John Locke - 336 years earlier and 965 miles south-east of this exact film - is also somehow pondering. He is sat, he is on holiday, it is unusually warm for his body and for the body of the fruit he is observing whilst recovering from a bout of popular 17th century respiratory ailment. He wonders aloud, and of the fruit's emissions:
... whether this be aer new generated or whether the springy particles of aer have, in the fruits out of which these fermenting liquors are drawn, by the artifice of nature these fermenting liquors are drawn, by the artifice of nature been pressed close together & whether fermentation does not loose these bonds & give them liberty to expand themselves again?
The big for Locke is the generation of aer new. The fruit is merely this question viewed at a certain portable scale, an exigency of holiday-problem-form. Back home, at a slightly grander scale the question addresses the origins of disease. Locke had it on good authority from his friend Robert Boyle that disease was not only air-new, but air-born, that it was generated in the depths of the earth itself - emanating out of mineshafts. Locke was sent to the Mendips to investigate but was refused entry by some suspicious employees.
Perhaps they were right to be suspicious of this man who seemed to think the earth was merely the grandest of putrid fruits: their mineshaft an incision into its rotting flesh, gassing-off in the summer sun. Yes the idea of subterranean winds seems to have been widely and enthusiastically affirmed - such gusting was considered to be precisely and formatively as old as the hills. The earth in 1621, according to Robert Burton, is full of which which ... sometimes breaking out, causeth horrible earthquakes.
This subterranean wind blows the whole was through the passage we have examined: beginning with the untimely popping of Mr. Number One; it proceeds through a certain configuration of trees to dismember a team of expert hikers; gives John Locke a cough; emanates out of various scales of rotten furring fruit; and ultimately ends up playing the earth like a cheap recorder.
In this final mode, in which the subterranean wind instrumentalists the world, we are introduced to the peculiar movement that belongs to Still Life: the internal motility and tremendous effort of stationary objects. This hidden mobility, which is also a predicament, conceals itself within the word "still" in its twofold significance as both stationary and persistent. This is what is meant, initially, by Still Life. 
Text by William Spendlove

(1) Still Life, Exhibition View, 2019

(2) Andi Magenheimer, Casualty of the Spite Garden, 2019

(3) Still Life, Exhibition View, 2019

(4) Still Life, Exhibition View, 2019

(5) John Greenwood, The Museum of Now, 2018

(6) Daniel Sparkes, Pepping the Guernic-eel, Installation View, 2019

(7) Daniel Sparkes, Pepping the Guernic-eel, 2019

Andi Magenheimer, (b. 1984) currently lives in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012 and The School of Visual Art in 2009. Awards include the Chelsea Arts Club Trust Special Projects Award, Burren Exchange, and the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts.

John Greenwood (b. 1959, Leeds) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1990, where he received the Cite Internationale Paris residency award, the Burston Award and the Midland Bank purchase award. Solo exhibitions include: Jason Rhodes Gallery, London (1995 and 1998), Galerie Helmut Pabst, Frankfurt (2000) and Europaische Zentral Galerie, Frankfurt (2002). Following a career break, recent shows have included; a solo show, ‘Being John Greenwood’ in 2014, curated by Juan Bolivar at the C+C Gallery, London and group shows in 2015, ‘Doppelganger’, No Format Gallery, London, ‘Tutti-Frutti’, Turps Gallery, London, ‘Anti-Social Realism’, Charlie Smith, London, ‘Present Tense’, Swindon Art Gallery and Museum and the ‘2nd Nanjing International Art Festival, Nanjing, China. In 2015 John; won the Bronze Award at the 2nd Nanjing International Festival.

Daniel Sparkes (b. 1980, Stroud, England), also known as Mudwig, is a self taught artist. Sparkes' recent solo and duo exhibitions include The Kudcom Catastrophe, Calm and Punk Gallery, Tokyo (2019); Woodland Reducer, Dinner Party Gallery, London (2018); The Teutonburg Pellets, Line Gallery, Stroud (2016); Yore Emmenness, Robbins & Roberts, SVA, Stroud (2014); The Smurfield Quag, Brabury & Blanchard, Sheffield (2013); About Looking at Hamburgers, Goldstein’s Gallery, London (2012).