23 August -
12 October 2025
Gertrude Contemporary21-31 High Street, Preston South
Opening: Friday 22 August, 6–8pm
“Also thinking about the flow of art in galleries, painter and musician Michael Kennedy’s commisioned work looks at how artworks move around as files in art organisations, reducing paintings to their titles. Michael’s obscure titles are notoriously complicated to type without copy and paste, given that he references internet speech, with letters that turn into numbers and keyboard symbols that adorn long sentences. A recent example of how Michael’s titles challenge fact-checking is his 2024 show at Caves, Despair Spring, in which he used one title for all the works in the gallery:
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Even though this may be an innocuous title for Michael, the number of symbols and idiosyncratic spaces has the power to hyper-fixate whoever has to quote them in a room sheet, catalogue, essay, or review. More hilerious is the fact that others may not be engaged in the subcultures that inform Michael’s titling practice, making one wonder why the artist uses such bleak language in the first place. Expanding upon scrunched paper text works he exhibited in 2019 titled Why does the sun go on shining? なぜ朝日は輝くの? at DÔ-SÔ, Fujiyoshida, Japan, Michael is printing the entirety of his practice on crumpled paper for Bureaucracy of Feelings, by way of an audit.” - Diego Ramírez, Bureaucracy of Feelings, Gertrude Contemporary, 2015 - 2025.
Bureaucracy of Feelings approaches the last decade of Gertrude through an anthology of Registered Charity: a small artist run space that neighboured the former for 17 years, until both galleries relocated to new premises. In an era of structured dissent, the curator of Bureaucracy of Feelings directed Registered Charityfrom 2018-2023, at which he met a number of artists who were responding to the administrative language—statements, policies, metrics, appointments, protocols—that dominated the last decade, in their artistic practices. In a series of new commissions, Lucreccia Quintanilla quotes corporate aphorisms; Moorina Bonini considers the impermanence of bodies that transit institutional spaces; Jemi Gale doodles like a frenzied clerk; and Michael Kennedy reduces an oeuvre of artworks to the indexification of files. Indeed, Bureaucracy of Feelings builds upon the premise of an anthology within a retrospective, to chart artists who were actively building, shaping and resisting frameworks that directly or indirectly supported Gertrude’s activities over the last decade. By operating as arts administrators, board members, on advisory panels, and volunteers in the broader art sector in tandem with their artistic practices.
What is the shape of the non-profit structure on display? Did professional managerialism become a standard response to social issues over the past ten years? Has this style, position or strategy achieved its aims or simply increased the volume of rules, procedures, HR speak, administrative forms and social media activity that engulfs our everyday lives? These queries become a site of poetic and artistic production, scraping lyrical residue from this corporate excess to reconfigure its homogeneity. Steven Rhall discloses his income statement; Daisy Collier ponders on the status of bricks and mortar on Unceded Land; Sarah Brasier paints about typing; Thea Jones stages a circle of pathos; Katie Paine repurposes office furniture with discretion; former members of Watch This Space stage a board meeting as a puppet show; Sophie Penkethman-Young meditates on the indeterminant progress of loading bars and spinning wheels; and John Elcatsha replicates their eye-strained prescription on glass.
The exhibition includes a collaborative work by Leonie Brialey, Sia Cox, Gabriel Curtin, Jonathan Daw, Jorgen Doyle, Charlie Freedman, Russell Goldflam, Tam Hanson, Harry Hayes, Vito Lucarelli, Meret McDonald, Dan Murphy, Seraphina Newberry, Garden Reflexxx, Beth Sometimes and Betty Sweetlove.
Artists:
Moorina Bonini
Sarah Brasier
Daisy Collier
John Elcatsha
Jemi Gale
Thea Jones
Michael Kennedy
Katie Paine
Sophie Penkethman-Young
Steven Rhall
Lucreccia Quintanilla
Opening night documentation by Machiko Abe.
Artwork/installation documentation by Christian Capurro.
