The Thousands

At the opening night of Patrick Rees’ 2011 show with Ben Leslie META, I overheard someone good-naturedly accuse him of having an embarrassing amount of phallic shapes and spoodge-like substances in his work. And that person was right, there was a lotta sticky dick stuff. There is something sweet about the clawing attempts at transgression in Patrick Rees’ lumpy, gloopy messes. Brown fur with silver holographic paper, whole slabs of plasticine set in thick bubbly resin, lumps of paint smeared across everything. Rees explains the work as an attempt to make something that doesn’t make sense, because nothing really makes sense, which makes sense to me. Cue up the Keanu stoner meme.

So yeah, Patrick Rees is in the front room of FELTspace, and in the back room they’ve got Malia Wearn with Will Happiness Find Me. Like her previous work, it trades on the personal and the confessional. So y’know, secrets; admissions of sexual affairs, heavy feelings and trivial habits. People like to dismiss this kinda art as ‘too girly’, which is a strange criticism to have directed at you when you actually are a girl. Wearn will be doing all sorts of ‘girly’ shit like sewing secrets in glow-in-the-dark thread, and Rees will be covering everything in messy liquids, so wear your gender-neutral hat to the party and order a cider at the bar.