GASWORKS, LONDON

JAMIE CREWE:FEMALE EXECUTIONER

26 January 2017 — 26 March 2017.

 

Female Executioner is the first solo exhibition in London by Glasgow-based artist Jamie Crewe. Comprising newly commissioned video, sculpture, print, and text-based works, the exhibition focuses on French writer Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel. Exploring what is at stake in historical reclamation, Female Executioner investigates what happens when a queer, transfeminine artist tries to touch, reflect on, or rehabilitate a historical work of fiction which seems to offer them ancestry.

First published in Belgium in 1884, Monsieur Venus describes the relationship between Raoule de Vénérande, a masculine aristocratic woman, and Jacques Silvert, a working class boy who becomes her mistress. Together, aided by Jacques’s sister Marie and Raoule’s friend the Baron de Raittolbe, the couple invert their genders, acting out a love fuelled by perverse innovation and tinged with sexual jealousy, conservatism and class power. In the end, the novel’s overarching Victorian morality falls upon its characters, and everyone is punished for their transgressions.

The video Adulteress (2017) stages the moment that Jacques slips away from Raoule to walk the streets in a black velvet dress and attempt to seduce a ‘real man.’ Chronology, setting and performance are unhinged from Rachilde’s original text, which appears at the bottom of the screen, as focus is given to Jacques’s excited journey instead of Raoule’s jealous rage. Rachilde's text dictates and contradicts the footage it accompanies: the video builds to an ending in which tentative, optimistic images synchronise with the promise of a duel to the death. Through these and other strategies—impartial editing, working with close friends and displacing the novel’s events to modern-day Glasgow—the radical potential and fundamental judgements of Monsieur Venus are made to trouble a new context.

Elsewhere in the exhibition a threatening invitation appears in flaming letters on a domestic wall in a screen print titled Miserable wretch (2017). The words of this note (which in Monsieur Venus is written by Marie Silvert and sent to her sister-in-law Raoule, who sees its words written in flaming letters on the wall of her Parisian drawing room) are transposed to the wall of a bedroom in Gasworks’s residencies house, where Jamie spent three months in the summer of 2016. The letters become fluorescent, and the room is drawn from memory.

Also on show, Inert being (2017) comprises twenty eight off-white soy wax tablets depicting a bouquet of flowers in counter-relief. These tablets will be rotated daily throughout the exhibition, displayed one at a time on an AV pole mount and viewable through a doorframe which has had its doors removed. Soy has anti-androgenic properties, which block testosterone production, and the twenty-eight tablets refer to the average length of a menstrual cycle; in Monsieur Venus a bouquet of ‘immaculate white flowers’ is sent daily to Jacques's apartment by Raoule, and he is scared to think why—perhaps because another mistress could put out red flowers when she is menstruating to let a visiting suitor know she is unavailable, and he cannot, and does not, and is constantly at Raoule's disposal.

The doors of the emptied doorframe can be found, displaced, fitting uncomfortably in the connecting aperture between the two gallery spaces. Pasted onto one of their glass panels is Stone breaker (2017), a text drawn on paper with a knife. The text describes Jamie's experience of gender while a resident at Gasworks in summer 2016, with a particular focus on the risks and consequences of annunciating; when Jamie speaks explicitly about their gender, in a new context and to new people, they find insecurity, doubt and pain stirred up, which they thought were in the past. This text, in black ink, is interrupted by and formed around bold phrases in red, which may be agreeing with the narrative or shouting it into submission.

Beyond these doors the second gallery space is washed an earthy, vegetal blue with powdered woad, contrary to Rachilde specifying a hidden room painted the blue of a ‘cloudless sky.’ In this space there is a sculpture called Wax figure (2017): a loose latex sheet is draped across boxes and ephemera from around Gasworks, creating a rough approximation of a reclining body. On the surface of this latex skin a few incorruptible markers of authenticity and femininity are burnt with a soldering iron, while the body has been voided of all its meat. These burnt features draw equally from the body parts Raoule plucks from Jacques's corpse (dead from a duel with the Baron de Raittolbe) to make a waxwork likeness of him, and from the make-up and grooming routine Jamie maintained while a resident at Gasworks.