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Cherry Bomb!
Kate Burling, Douglas Cantor, Anna Choutova, Nettle Grellier, Gosia Kołdraszewska, Lydia Pettit, Olivia Sterling, Sophie Vallance Cantor
13 Sept - 4 Oct
PV Friday, 12 Sept, 6-9pm
Cherry Bomb!, the tenth exhibition at miłość, features Kate Burling, Anna Choutova, Douglas Cantor, Nettle Grellier, Gosia Kołdraszewska, Lydia Pettit, Olivia Sterling, Sophie Vallance Cantor in their interpretations of the theme of cherries in the media of painting, drawing, installation and film.
Not unlike an apple, but sexier, the cherry has become a symbol of innocence and youth and their inevitable loss. Taking the title from the Runaway’s punk rock hit, the exhibition is an image of rebellion, decadence, loudness. Yet, in the abundance of sweetness and explosiveness, there is risk of nausea, and the loss of purity is traced with nostalgia – so be careful not to choke on the pit whilst you tie the stem into a knot.
Cherry Bomb! is accompanied by an exhibition text by Asha Palacios. The private view will coordinate with local openings, as we premiere the Haggerston Gallery Map together with Alma Pearl, Final Hot Desert, Project Loop and Seventeen.
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
EXHIBITION TEXT BY ASHA PALACIOS
Cherry Bomb!
The cherry throughout the history of art and literature has symbolised dualities, innocence, and the mirrored flip side to innocence. With their shiny and hard exterior, their polish lends an elegance to any scene they adorn and their pit lends something to enter for.
Cherries fresh and firm, cherries pounded with sugar, simmered, boiled, and stirred into thick, nauseating, but delicious jam. Cyanide pits removed and pounded into a separate poison — inextricable from its evergreen representation of youth, purity, and abundance, is the cherry’s destiny to rot. In Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1816), the cherry orchard represents an initial youth and the freshness of spring that turns like the seasons into a symbol of the past, of decay and fracture of a nation. The fresh, firm fruits of promise are the pretext for a country’s revolution.
In Lydia Pettit’s film Abundance, the plentiful cherry, gushing and numerous, simultaneously fills, chokes, and overflows from Pettit’s mouth. Some pits are spat out while others are swallowed whole. The cherries, a promise of pleasure, become a source of violence and gore.
This use of cherries as abundance dates back throughout art history as well. In the 14th and 15th century, Catalonian gothic murals depicted cherries scattered across banquet tables or piled in bowls as offerings. They were presented as gifts, as objects of abundance and plenty, as symbols of sweetness and purity.
This promise of abundance and prosperity is presented in Douglas Cantor’s glowing red cherries. In his work the reality of cherries presents itself alongside the maraschino promise of the west: the assurance of an idyllic and prosperous life. The bright red cherries in his paintings are flawless and sweet, but an illusory pleasure. Cherries actually grow on bushes, they’re not only jarred as sweet candies; cherries actually crunch, they’re sour, they have pits that can break your teeth or be made into poison. Why did no one mention this?
In Anna Choutova’s Forbidden Love, a tin of canned meat lays pearlescently in the central gaze of the painting, an eastern assurance of longevity and sureness, food which will never go bad, while the stray, uncentered cherry - firm, fresh, foreign, western - looms on the periphery, its presence promising abundance yet encroaching upon the glimmering safety of the familiar.
The cocktail cherry finds its way as well into the world of Sophie Vallance Cantor where they glow, absolutely luminescent, filling a dark bowl like a tempting offering to the viewer in a painting titled Cherries for our Table. In A Second Bite of the Cherry, the cherry presents itself in a way familiar to us: as icon and accessory.
In contemporary media, we have seen the cherry be used as the symbol of shiny sexuality (largely in the 1990s and 2000s), to its more coquettish use in the next decade as it became a trademark of girlish internet aesthetics, to in the last couple of years as the cherry seems to reach back to its art historical roots of decoration frequently seen on tablescapes at events or for gatherings. In this, the cherry has maintained its connotations of sexuality, precociousness, and decadence, but cleaned up its teenage reputation. The cherry has now come of age a bit and is increasingly being utilised as a vessel for self-exploration and reclamation of one’s sexuality and agency. In the tablescape, it replaces the performative sexuality associated with the vintage housewife aesthetic and instead uses its sensuality to emphasise a hedonistic decadence within domesticity that has previously been made to seem near impossible.
This growing sense of reappropriating the cherry is articulated in Gosia Kołdraszewska’s historically-informed work. Through her research of the antiquated practices relating to “proving” a young woman’s virginity before marriage and the insistence on virginity as something being “lost to” or “taken by” a man, Kołdraszewska concludes astutely that the whole circus has always come down to a matter of opinion rather than fact, as virginity cannot actually be medically proven. She takes matters into her own hands, through a series of graphite drawings, she pops her own cherry. Cherry Bomb!
The cherry as a tool for self-exploration appears as well in Kate Burling’s works. Between her finger-painting (a practice she uses to engage with the dichotomy between softness and hardness through the surface of the skin) and her installation, Burling’s cherries oppose each other. In Things I Keep, the cherries are soft, firm yet lush, luminous, framed in a heavenly landscape; the cherries that hang overhead, however, these cherries are darker. They appear to have dripped, raining shadow and liquid, having flooded a bathtub with their juices and cast their individual shadows like a dark swarm.
In Olivia Sterling’s paintings, the cherry finds itself contextualised in Sterling’s ongoing questioning of stereotypes and cultural intersections. Bold colours and bodies approach cherries with their fingertips ready to pinch and consume the little succulent treats. Alongside Sterling’s signature typographic labelling of the colours in the paintings —which is reminiscent almost of paint-by-numbers and intended to challenge the prescribed meanings of colour in a racial context — the cherry urges the viewer to consider their preconceived associations with the imagery presented whether that be about colour, sexuality, or otherwise.
Nettle Grellier’s drawings, made following her visit to Fête de la Cerise de Céret (an annual cherry festival in Céret, France), share the energy of The Runaways song from which Cherry Bomb! takes its name. In a series of vignettes portraying brazenly blasé personal interactions with the fruit, Grellier’s figures are unapologetic, all fingers on deck; there are pits being spat, stems on display. In their commitment to their personal indulgence, they edge into a show of opposition. They are punk, they are confrontational. The question ‘am I bothering you?’ will not leave their mouths.
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In Cherry Bomb!, the fruit takes its forms through various moods and visual aesthetics: as dangerous, as promising, as personal, as indulgent, as disappointing. It becomes clear that the cherry is dynamic, it is personal, and it is affective. This exhibition draws on a punk spirit, but emphasises the nuance behind confrontation, the questions that lead to disillusionment that can turn to frustration, to overwhelm. What does a promise entail?
The cherry is naturally a gift, an offering. Cherry Bomb! is about what you may do with that gift, what it means to receive a gift, what it means to hold the power to give a gift.
Somehow, the cherry forces everyone to consider their own context. What are you looking at? What do you want? May you consume?
How do you eat cherries? As cocktail, maraschino, as woman? As jam, as firm fruit?
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
AVAILABLE NOW
A Rosa is a Rose
Douglas Cantor
£12.99