Ruthless Aggression, 2002-2008

5 Jun-26 Jul 2026

PV 4 Jun 2026,

Overview

Ruthless Aggression is an exhibition of new work by multidisciplinary artist Dandy Day.

Dandy Day’s practice encompasses a range of forms and media, including drawing, collage, banners, sculpture, painting, and installation. Day’s approach to making is autobiographical, drawing on personal memories and family histories to explore broader societal themes within contemporary lived experience.  

In their practice, Day freely borrows images, texts, objects, materials and signifiers from wider popular culture that hold personal meaning and history, creating ambiguity and slippages between personal fact and cultural fiction. Combining ‘low-fi’ aesthetics and everyday cultural production with formal display strategies traditionally associated with the museum or archive, Day’s artworks convey personal and social narratives, imbued with an uncanny sense of loss, trauma, pathos, horror and humour.

In Ruthless Aggression, Day presents an installation formed from a new body of work centred on the commercial spectacle of WWE, an American sports entertainment form that presents ‘professional wrestling’.  Widely followed by both men and women across the USA and around the world, WWE features extreme acts of theatrical violence by exaggerated characters and personas. Trading liberally in stereotypes of violence, masculinity, misogyny, and racism, WWE gives licence to an audience to express their latent desires.  In more recent times, WWE has become closely aligned with the populist MAGA movement.

Day has transformed the gallery into a mise-en-scene of a boy’s teenage bedroom, complete with blue walls, skirting and ubiquitous beige pile carpet, but empty of furniture or bedding. On the walls, Day has installed large images within cheap domestic clip frames.

Echoing the room in which they are presented, the images clinically depict close-ups from a boy’s bedroom, focusing on apparently empty features such as the bed or door frame, or the soft, cuddly Disney character toys. The formal painterly qualities of the images, their composition and tone, sit at odds with their cheap presentation and the emptiness of the images. The apparent details of the scene within the room, as witnessed by the soft toys, are left to the viewer's imagination.

Occupying and dispersed throughout TACO! are a number of large-scale, free-standing, oversized cardboard cut-outs which one might readily encounter in a store or in the home of a fan.  Depicting wrestling toy figurines, they gurn, scream and shout in theatrical wrestling poses, their intimidating appearance undercut by bathos.

The images of the toy figures are derived from the artist's own collection, sourced online in homage to the toys she played with as a child with her brothers. These flat, two-dimensional cut-out figures present different poses and versions of the wrestler Chris Benoit, an infamous figure in American wrestling. In 2007, the wrestler committed the double murder of his wife and child before taking his own life. His fatal psychosis was attributed to the years of head trauma sustained throughout his wrestling career.

Left on the outside of the gallery is framed fan ‘memorabilia’. Taking the form of cheap handwritten signs on brightly coloured neon card. Made to be held aloft at wrestling events visible to, and in acknowledgement of, the TV cameras. They comment on the wrestlers or give wry or surreal knowing remarks on one's own part in the violent spectacle, “HAVE YOU TAKEN YOUR SHOT YET?”.. “PINK FLUFFY KITTENS!”...

§

Dandy Day (b.1999) a multidisciplinary artist from London. Recent exhibitions include Cheap Cheap Gallery (Birmingham) Stour Space, Letherby Gallery,and Palmer Gallery (London) . They are currently studying at the Royal Academy Schools (2024-2027)

Artists