Anna Clegg Stainless at Soup Gallery, London

 Burning Spear, 2024 Oil on canvas 60cm x 45cm x 4cm

By ESME BLAIR June 11, 2024 

Accompanying Anna Clegg’s first solo show Stainless which opened at Soup Gallery on the twenty-fifth of April, is a text written by the artist detailing how she would cheat on her tests at school ‘as much as possible.’ I was glad I read the piece of writing (arguably a work in itself) before moseying around the measured but eclectic series of paintings as it allowed for the perception of the show to be read through a kind of conniving kinship with Anna from the get go. Memories circulated of formulating as unprecedented a method as possible in order to deceive old school teachers- an experience I imagine is hardly unique to her and I. Apart from anything else it’s an initiation into Anna’s purview; autofictive, mischievous, referential without the need to explain herself. Foggy (mis)remembrance runs as theme throughout the exhibition- her subject matter ranging from the interiors of her home to SoundCloud rappers to a roguish bedbug in a dive bar. She spoke to me of the text, calling it a ‘story,’ that it was ‘grown artificially from a couple of isolated memories that got stitched together, like a collage. I had even cemented it as a real memory in my head, it was only a few days before the show that I realised I had misremembered the whole thing. The particular mode of cheating featured in the text is kind of cowardly, to try your best in an honest way but not be able to accept you got something wrong, or fear the consequences too much. The story ends in forgiveness.

Exterior 1, 2024 Oil on canvas 60cm x 50cm x 4cm

Exterior 1 depicts a glance from a distance at the entrance to Charing Cross Hospital at night, resembling a shot from 24 hours in A&E, a 'testament to Anna’s technique which makes semi morose scenes glimmer. What could be a still from reluctant late night telly becomes of intrigue for its twinkling loneliness, the reframing of the inner city hospital scene itself shattering the usually overlooked. She told me this was one of the images she chose as ‘scenes with no personal value to anyone even myself, but are the surroundings/stand ins for personal, lived moments. [This painting depicts] the outside of a hospital next to my studio that I would walk past while a family member resided in another hospital halfway across the country.’ The same can be said for both Exterior 2 and Interior 7, placed on adjacent walls, the two are painted so as to be viewed with the same level of mutual wow factor and detachment- the former being of a non-descript presumed music concert with blaring green lighting, the latter being of a tall glass covered in cello-tape filled with pens and the like, surrounded by familiar interior debris like coins, string and wrappers. Anna told me the gig depicted was one of The Cure’s. In her words; ‘The images are chosen not for their formal content but for what or where they show, a background to a conversation, signal or signpost towards some kind of cultural commodity.’ These interiors and exteriors are softly spoken, aided by Anna’s nebulous application of paint providing velvetine surfaces; as though we’re looking through a gauze or watching her work flicker up on a low resolution TV.

 Stainless, Coloured pencil on paper, 2024

Stainless, the show’s titular work is a kind of bejewelled level of multicolour, the paper- unframed- is so densely coloured-in like an engraving that it has deformed somewhat, spotlit by its lack of frame so we can admire its curvature as it twirls off the wall, attached by blu-tack. The picture has its own upstairs room in the show, fitting for the isolated matter; a cartoonesque bedbug sits alone in a dive bar with its back to us on a bar stool, various half-drunk bottles littering the dingy environment. We see our hero the bedbug’s mischievous face reflected back at us off of some mirrored surface. This work is the most fictitious in the show, the others being more ‘photographic’ in Anna’s words. She noted ‘Stainless was certainly a departure from the rest of the show, which all came from singular, selected imagery that was then translated into paintings without much deviation from the source material. The difference in approach mainly came from what I felt was an appropriate response to the source motif, which is a cartoon bug that features on the album cover of Bedhead by bar italia (that image itself ripped from a semi-animated film of the same name uploaded online). In opposition to the images downstairs, which are distanced presentations of symbols in the wider economies of music, contemporary art, health, family, childhood, media and their integration into every day life, I wanted this one to be intensely subjective to the point of childishness - the drawing could be a children’s cartoon if not for the suggestion of alcohol abuse.’ Playing with the spectrum of reality and the imaginary, the details within Anna’s richly figurative pictures aid us in the world building. Her reference to bar italia here almost is irrelevant to the audience, rather more a giggle with herself.

Exterior 2, 2024 Oil on canvas 30cm x 25cm x 4cm

What Stainless also explores though is a subtle thread which runs throughout the exhibition: the practice of music fanaticism. Anna told me how much she loved Bedhead, the album she stole the bedbug from; ‘I think it has a unique sonic register, an unfixed quality to it that makes it really special, and I think I’ll come back to it forever. When it came out in 2021 I listened to it unremittingly, almost abusively in that I was using it to get me to a desired emotional state (not very positive) semi-artificially. It was the last instance of a particularly adolescent mode of listening that I since haven’t—and won’t—experience again, and this mode of emotionally directed, transactional media consumption, sentimental, affectionate, cowardly and delusional, is what I wanted to pin at the top of the show. Listening to it also went from an isolated experience into something else over the years which plays into it a bit too, interrupting something quite private with something more social. There was no way I could have used another image, and no way I could have presented it in the same way as the others, I had to take it and make it do something else.’  Despite her initial relationship to bar italia’s music as associated with some kind of neglect of self care, obsessively listening to the album in question, Anna has churned out an image replete with comedy- we delight at the thought of what has led this crazy frog looking bedbug to a gritty part of town- what is it drinking? How does it pay in this cash only bar as implied by the signs behind the counter? Does it have little bug pockets in which to keep its little bug money? 

Interior 7, 2024 Oil on canvas 40cm x 50cm x 4cm

The plotting scheming bar italia bedbug snuck into the exhibition alongside a few other musical cameos like painter Kai Althoff playing guitar as a young boy depicted all in yellow and outlined in red resembling some waxy relief sculpture about to be cast in bronze. A painting featuring only the word ‘illness’ from The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 1996 album Thank God for mental illness which once again references a band’s album artwork. We get a feeling of an image-based lore around the music; the small hints of picture we get alongside a record, leaving the rest for us to fill in when immersing ourselves in the listening process. Also in the show is Interior 6 featuring a zoomed cropping of SoundCloud rapper Xaviersobased. We discussed how SoundCloud rap has a bad reputation; ‘I like how it sounds, mainly, and how ambivalent it is. Lyrically the songs often don't make much sense and have no one stance on things, it’s always wrong-footing you: simultaneously aspirational, self-detrimental, vulnerable, cruel, lazy, derivative, humorous. And sonically it takes these huge risks whilst circling something seemingly mainstream. Some songs just sound like they’re totally collapsing in on themselves, or like a motor continually starting up and failing, stalling. I was really influenced by this way of structuring music when I first heard it, different versions of the same song fracturing out into a prism of repeated reflections at different speeds and pitches. It’s like a drawing or something, an image rather than a story.’ How different are an image and a story? Adding music into this trifecta seems to be conjuring some kind of creatively productive triangular ouroboros. ‘Anything teenagers are making with no budget and free software is cool and will inevitably be pushing something in an exciting direction. The yellow painting of the boys with musical instruments is like a proxy sentiment, the difference simply being that the instruments are more visual.’  I thought about the digital/ analogue translation of SoundCloud rap to early years guitar experimentation and the echo of this in turning photographs whether computer based or otherwise into a painting/ object. 

 Interior 6, 2024 Oil on canvas 40cm x 30cm x 4cm

Stainless’ most impressive characteristic is in the curation; the cordial streak which runs from portrait to still life to text to cartoon, which allows for the seemingly arbitrary to sing as a harmonious one. ‘The title Stainless was chosen in part as a gesture that absolves me of responsibility for what turns out to be a set of pretty straightforward images.’ Stainlessness implies a pristine quality, rather detached from the pleasant grunge each image is teeming with in this exhibition. Demure in scale- none of the works exceed an edge of over 75cm- Anna’s sweeping references give the exhibition a prevailing confidence. ‘I can’t make a case for lying in real life, but to bunch and twist your experiences up into something concentrated that resonates with other people does tend to make good story telling, art and music. Just really honing in on something, philosophising about it or creating some artifice around it might be a form of lying, and I always enjoy experiencing that kind of thing.’ People glean from these images of relatable life what they want to; flitting from oversentimentality to cowering detachment, these pictures incite ample storytelling in perpetuity. WM