Ruthless Aggression, 2002-2008

5 Jun-26 Jul 2026

PV 4 Jun 2026,

Overview

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, using their own personal memories and family histories to explore wider societal themes within contemporary lived experience.  

In their artwork 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 forms of everyday cultural production with formal and elevated 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, 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 consists of extreme acts of theatrical violence by exaggerated characters and personas, trading liberally in stereotypes of violence, masculinity, misogyny, and racism. In more recent times, WWE has become intimately aligned with the populist MAGA movement.

Dandy 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. Occupying and dispersed throughout this domestic scene 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 their 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 due to the years of head trauma sustained throughout his wrestling career.

On the walls, Day has installed a number of collages, presented in cheap domestic clip frames. Reminiscent of informal bedroom collages, personal and intimate, the images show cheering crowds holding signs at wrestling matches alongside selections from Dandy’s personal archive of family photographs, sketches, magazines, postcards, and stills from home videos of the artists and her brother's role-playing. 

Alongside, Day includes further fan ‘memorabilia’, in the form of cheap handwritten signs on brightly coloured neon card. Made to be held aloft at wrestling events visible to, and in acknowledgment 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: “AM I ON TV?”... “ HERE TO WOAH!”... “PINK FLUFFY KITTENS!”...

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Dandy Day (b.1999) is 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)

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A limited edition by Dandy Day accompanies the exhibition.

Artists