Abby Wright
Abby Wright
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Abby Wright
Paper Body Landscape; Mark Remnants on My Back, 2020
Giclée print on matte paper
45.7 x 38.1 cm (unframed)
62 cm x 52 cm (framed)
Edition of 8 + 4 AP
Edition 1/8 + 4 AP is sold framed at £2,000
Editions 2-4/8 + 4 AP are sold unframed at £1,800
About this Work
The works Wright has made this year focus on Lacan’s definition of “jouissance beyond the pleasure principle”, to denote a more excessive kind of pleasure and constant need to transgress the limits imposed on enjoyment and desire. Wright's aim within this work is to play and engage with the ‘pleasure principle’, experimenting with aspects of touch and intimacy. The artist explores space and the physicality of touch through performances, occupying different spaces and creating visual landscapes of non-traditional mark-making. In these performances, Wright uses oil pastels in between her fingers and toes, or paint on her feet, which is inspired by Georges Bataille’s writing. The French philosopher describes the human toe as the most human part of the body; “...with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse -- a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.” (Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939)
About Abby Wright
Abby Wright is a multidisciplinary American artist based in London. She graduated with a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and later pursued her Masters in Contemporary Photography, Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in London.
Through the act of staging events, Wright’s work narrates diverse sociocultural themes that encapsulate gender, marginalisation and class as the foundations for discord and division. Wright plays with different media such as music, sculpture, painting, somatic movement and text to create experimental abstract films and performances. Wright’s work aims to challenge the oppressive forces of capitalism, inspired by various readings, including Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, and Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto. Wright believes that the world can be understood as one body inhabiting a multiplicity of meanings and realities. She draws inspiration from Carolee Schneemann’s raw materials, and Rebecca Horn’s Berlin Exercises: Dreaming under Water, 1974–5. Wright also references the works created by artist Helen Frankenthaler and explores the performance of painting, as dance, or as one of many characters for a photograph. She also interrogates the characters people play for other people, and ultimately how she as an artist performs.
Education
2020 MA Central Saint Martins, Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophy
2014 BFA School of Visual Arts, Photograph
Awards & Prizes
2017
The School of Design Prize, University of Leeds, UK
2012
Certificate for Outstanding Photography | Bexleyheath Civic Centre,
Certificate of Attendance, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK
2011
Highly Commended Certificate of Merit | Stables Gallery, Hall Place, Bexley, UK
Residencies
2019
Alter Us Collective, London, UK
Artist-in-Residence, Stokkøyart, Stokkøya, Norway
2018
Artist-in-Residence, Global Art Practice, London, Wakehurst, Tokyo, Aomori, Fukushima, Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Artist-in-Residence, Arebyte Gallery, Oxford Street Studios, London, UK
Exhibitions
Artist Residency, Dada Post, Berlin, Germany - July- October 3
Saatchi Gallery, London UK, group show- August- October 9
New composers fund USA - July 2020
Thesis Presentation at Central Saint Martins - May 2020
Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, “The Space Between” – January 2020
Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, “Circus” – January 2020
Publication, Schon! Magazine, March 2020
I interviewed members of the Kiki ballroom community, asking them about the political state of the United States and the way they choose to express themselves through voguing.
Big Space Exhibition, Central Saint Martins – February 2020
I made castings of intimate touches between friends and displayed them throughout the space along with a painting I made using my breath, inspired by Luce Irigaray’s text, “The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger”.
The Ringling Underground, Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida – September 2019
This work was a temporary performance. Musicians played how they perceived a painting I was making live, and I painted as they played as a simultaneous performance. More than 1,000 people came through the event.
Apiary Studios, We Are Here, We Are– March 6-9 2019
Tate Exchange/ Tate Modern – 2019
383 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY - October 2016
Thesis Show, The School of Visual Arts - 2014
Bushwick Open Studios, NY, NY - 2012-2016