The Shock of the Now - Issue #180
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 180 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes twelve Recommended Exhibitions, as well as nine fresh Artist Opportunities.
I hope you enjoy Issue 180, and if so do forward it along! As always, questions and comments are welcome, so feel free to get in touch, H x
Recommended Exhibitions Opening This Week :
Duane Linklater - ‘akâmi-’ Solo Exhibition - Camden Art Centre, Belsize Park (3rd July - 21st September, opening Wednesday 2nd July, 6:30-9:30pm)
Camden Art Centre and New Curators present ‘akâmi-’, the first major UK institutional exhibition of Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Ininiwak multimedia artist based in North Bay, Ontario, Canada.
“Curated by the second cohort of New Curators fellows, the exhibition interrogates power, individual and collective identity, absence and memory within contemporary Indigenous life and institutional practices. ‘akâmi-’ features a new ceramic commission created with Sugpiaq artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, under the collective name Grey Plumes, a recent painting series and a sculptural sound installation. It also includes an installation acquired by Tate, which incorporates a video by his son, Tobias Linklater and objects made by Linklater’s grandmother, Ethel (Trapper) Linklater borrowed from the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Northern Ontario, confronting questions of ownership and the responsibilities that accompany it.” - Camden Art Centre
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Group Exhibition - Incubator, Marylebone (3rd July - 3rd August, opening Wednesday 2nd July, 5:30-7:30pm)
Incubator and MAMA present ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a group exhibition featuring Kesewa Aboah, Shanti Bell, Suzanne Clements, Fleur Dempsey, Xingxin Hu, Lorena Levi, Florence Reekie, Anna Rocke, Elinor Stanley, Mary Stephenson, Maayan Sophia Weisstub, and C. Lucy R. Whitehead.
“The Yellow Wallpaper draws inspiration from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story to explore the interior as a charged, contested space. Long associated with domesticity and passivity, the interior is reclaimed here by women artists as a site of psychological complexity, creative agency, and quiet resistance.” - Incubator x MAMA
Donovan Wylie - ‘Lighthouse’ Solo Exhibition + Nadia Waheed - ‘Noemata’ Solo Exhibition - Ames Yavuz, Mayfair (3rd July - 8th August, opening Wednesday 2nd July, 6-8pm)
Ames Yavuz presents Donovan Wylie’s solo exhibition ‘Lighthouse’ and Nadia Waheed’s solo exhibition ‘Noemata’.
“Ames Yavuz presents Lighthouse, a solo exhibition by Donovan Wylie. The body of work on view comprises long-exposure photographs of distant lighthouses, visible only by their points of light within vast seascapes; representing both barriers and invitations, closeness and distance. As in his earlier work, Wylie approaches Lighthouse through a process of “surrendering” to the subject. The neutralisation of authorial subjectivity continues Wylie’s long-standing “systematic approach” as an image-making practice, in which the contingencies and contextual vagaries of his subject-matter dictate the form and format of the work.
Ames Yavuz presents Noemata, a solo exhibition of paintings by Nadia Waheed. The works on view adopt an ethos of transformative attention and agency, and interface closely with the realities of the artist’s life within and beyond the studio. Noemata marks a new evolution in the artist’s practice, known for its layering of myth, science, religion and philosophy to craft complex autobiographical meditations. Here, Waheed embraces the material possibilities and unpredictability of paint, and synthesises it with her instinct for drawing. A new tension arises on the surfaces of the works.” - Ames Yavuz
Zofia Pałucha - ‘Rich Folks Don't Explain Shit’ Solo Exhibition - miłość, Haggerston (4th July - 9th August, opening Thursday 3rd July, 6-9pm)
miłość presents Zofia Pałucha’s solo exhibition ‘Rich Folks Don't Explain Shit’.
“Zofia Pałucha, born in 1993 in Częstochowa, earned a PhD in Fine Arts in 2024. She lives and works in Wrocław. Pałucha’s recent body of work navigates the intersection of personal experience and political commentary through a distinctly digital lens. Her artistic practice embraces fragmented visuals from the internet, blending everyday interactions with the virtual world. Working predominantly on her smartphone, Pałucha manipulates amateur photography, accidental captures, and cinematic stills, recontextualising these images through apps. Her interest in these fleeting, often overlooked images allows her to critique the commodification and transience of human experience and media.” - miłość
Alice Fraser - ‘GODAM DOGMA’ Solo Exhibition - TINA, Soho (4th July - 9th August, opening Thursday 3rd July, 6-8pm)
TINA presents Alice Fraser’s solo exhibition ‘GODAM DOGMA’
“In GODAM DOGMA, Alice Fraser’s paintings stage an intervention into the psychic orthodoxy of motherhood and the archetype of the bad mum. Neither a mother herself, nor the child of a bad mum, Fraser approaches the maternal as myth, projection, and academic obsession. The exhibition emerges not from personal trauma, but from within the psychoanalytic training space she is currently in where maternal failure is framed as both the root of all suffering and the sacred origin of subjectivity. Fraser asks: what does it mean to make art about bad mums when you haven’t had one—when the ‘bad mum’ is less a memory than a theory? What does it mean to be trained to think maternally while suspended in the limbo of wanting motherhood, haunted by hypothetical children and potential failures? What happens when the language of care becomes clinical doctrine—ritualised, pathologised, and so abstracted it forgets the body it began with?” - TINA