Frieze London Littlewhitehead (Craig Little & Blake Whitehead)

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  For Frieze Focus 2024 Nir Altman is pleased to present new works by Glasgow-based littlewhitehead (Craig Little b.1980, Glasgow and Blake Whitehead b.1985, Lanark).

  ‘Structures of feeling’ and ‘affective landscapes’ are cultural studies terms that could also be used to describe the environments littlewhitehead create.  The booth includes both sculpture and painting, objects that evoke the atmosphere of a place, an atmosphere then mined for its ideological and social significance. 

  Abandonment might be said to be littlewhitehead’s artistic method, since they remove all signs of life from their work. A jacket hangs impaled on a wire fence; a broken tree slumps over its fallen leaves; perfume fills a copper disc diffusing bodiless scents; an automated painting emulates a flickering tv screen. Even though a vandalised wall hints at human activity, close inspection reveals spray painted lines impossible for a human hand to make. 

  This process of abandonment helps littlewhitehead get at the object’s ideological substructure,  real things become an idea or image of themselves, their meaning coming to the fore as their use value recedes.  As dystopian as this sounds, littlewhitehead do not deal in either fantasy or realism, but in a heightened version of experience, showing how systems of representation so thoroughly determine how we move through the world.

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