In his solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, Jesse Darling continues to explore the contradictions and complexities of the present continuous and past imperfect, using a multidisciplinary approach that spans sculpture, drawing, installation, and text. The works on display reflect on alternative histories and the speculative present, always playing between the familiar and the strange. In the foreground of his practice, Darling underscores the agency, fragility, and subversiveness of life as it is reflected in the living world and the built environment, societies, technologies, the hubris and desire of human beings, and the objects we gather around ourselves as narrative totems. Using found and sculpted objects based in everyday materials and common consumer and industrial goods, Darling makes connections between individual existence and collective experience. The medium is always the message, and these objects speak on a register we all recognise, somewhere between the tool and the relic and the commodity fetish.
Jesse Darling (b. Oxford, UK) is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, and performance. Jesse is the winner of the Turner Prize 2023. Selected solo exhibitions include Gravity Road, Mining History Centre, Lewarde, FR (2023); Turner Prize 2023 Winner, Towner Eastbourne, Eastbourne, UK (2023); Enclosures, Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2022); No Medals No Ribbons, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (2022); Gravity Road, Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, DE (2020); Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße Prize, Bremen (2020); The Ballad of St Jerome, Art Now, Tate Britain, London, UK (2018); The Great Near, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2016). Jesse Darling’s works are in major public collections including Tate, London (UK); Arts Council, London (UK); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (FR); FRAC des Pays de la Loire (FR); UK Government Art Collection, London (UK); Glasgow Museums, Glasgow (UK); CNAP (FR); X Museum, Beijing (CN); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (LB).