New Art Exchange is delighted to announce 'Activating Intersections' the upcoming solo show of interdisciplinary British-Jamaican artist and TV personality Quilla Constance, aka QC.
The show constitutes a major commission of QC’s new large-scale oil paintings, carnivalesque-punk costumes, and live works alongside a selection of her previous videos and clips from her mainstream TV interventions on BAFTA-winning TV show Rob & Romesh Vs.
Quilla Constance (born Jennifer Allen) has exhibited internationally since 2003. And since 2009, she has strategically deployed her QC persona and interdisciplinary art practice across diverse contexts from art galleries and museums, to music clubs, theatres, the street, and mainstream TV.
Ultimately, QC seeks to channel her mixed heritage subject positions through embracing tensions and activating the intersections between disciplines and contexts – to disrupt reductive and injurious categories, stereotypes and socio-cultural narratives. In short, QC intends to reveal and challenge the construct and limitations of hegemony and champion artistic possibilities for creating an egalitarian British society.
QC employs languages of exoticism, anarcho-punk feminism, and absurdist humour as tools to dismantle inequalities and promote empowered modes of being for marginalised communities such as the Global Ethnic Majority, women, working-class and LGBTQ+.
Further to this – QC’s newly commissioned paintings and eclectic carnivalesque costume installations are heavily informed by her socially-engaged Open Studio workshops held at Tate Modern in 2019-2020, where she invited over 1000 visitors from diverse demographics to wear her outfits and create spontaneous performances using a range of socio-cultural objects, from British bone China to Mr Kipling cake boxes – to Cassavas.
These large-scale paintings playfully situate diverse, costume-clad, and eclectic prop-wielding workshop participants within manipulated interiors of Buckingham Palace and the faded Baroque and colonial interiors of other UK stately homes in a bid to reassert marginalised identities and to question and reclaim the lineage of acquisitions such as the Crown Jewels. Other works reimagine intersectional subjects within surrealist mashups, conflating Michelangelo’s David with Aphrodite - peppered with Ackee alongside precarious British tea sets.
