At the start of last year Sarah Lucas opened Situation – a London-based project space featuring an organic program of events and installations by the artist, and sometimes others. Her latest show, Situation, Romans (above) is killer, and features Lucas’s classic abject pantyhose forms and other perverse content (check out the wall frieze).
Given her penchant for the prurient, it’s no wonder Lucas struck up a friendship with New Zealand artist Rohan Wealleans when she undertook a residency in Auckland care of Two Rooms in 2011.
In the middle of last year, Lucas invited Wealleans to be part of another situation (above). Situation White Hole featured works by Lucas alongside photographs from Wealleans’ Origins series, initially exhibited at Ivan Anthony in Auckland. Wealleans blew the original images up to monstrous scale for Lucas’s show, so that her humble toilet assemblages were flanked by enormous, almost alien ladybits – all encrusted with the artist’s signature paint ‘gemstones’; kind of like Courbet’s The Origin of the World meets high art vajazzling. One can’t help but wonder whether the close up scrutiny of male members in Lucas’s latest show is in direct response to Wealleans Origins objectifications.
En route to London Wealleans made a stopover in Thailand and had this rather magnificent photograph taken of himself in a local mall. While he’s undecided as to what to do with it, he does have another suite of Origins-style snaps in the pipeline. Watch this space.
Leg of Lamb 