Missteps
Angelina May Davis
Cedar Lewisohn
Missteps is an exhibition that considers history as inherently unstable and constructed. It examines how narratives are shaped, distorted, and repeated through cultural reproduction, whether through the Western modernist gaze on 20th-century African culture, or through post-war grand narratives of “quintessential” Englishness and imperial identity, and the lingering afterlives of empire during decline.
Cedar Lewisohn’s large-format book project, The Murdoch Prophesy, consists of lino prints and drawings inspired by both paintings from the modernist period and depictions by European artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Hannah Höch, as well as masks from West Africa drawn in situ in museums. The books are large, sculptural objects, and in the artist’s imagination they are to be read as one might watch analogue cartoons, old animations from the 1970s - a relevant crossover with Davis’ work.
Angelina May Davis’ paintings relate to a formative experience of growing up in a working-class English village whose rituals and aesthetics; village greens, cricket teams, and church bells, bembody a performed and already mythologised “Englishness.” Her work emerges from a tension between this lived environment and an early awareness that postmodernism was already quietly dismantling the certainty of such narratives. Davis talks about her work through a very particular aesthetic, through the chroma of early colour TV and the informal line and form within her paintings, drawing on a mix between Warner Brothers cartoons and pencil studies for paintings by Gainsborough.
Together, the works in this exhibition frame history not as a stable account, but as a set of misreadings: reproduced, critiqued, idealised, and contested. The exhibition considers how cultural memory is shaped by both deliberate construction and inherited fiction, where Englishness, colonial histories, and visual culture are never simply recorded, but continually misstepped into being.
Division of Labour c/o The Florence Trust, Holy Trinity Church, Cloudesley Sq, London N10HN
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