A gasp is involuntary.
A gaaaaaaasp is performative, a melodramatic flinging up of the arms, a prolonged recoiling.
A gaaaaaaasp is both sound and action.
A gaaaaaaasp might dissolve into a wail.
- Jennifer Higgie
The Perimeter is pleased to present Alexandra Metcalf: Gaaaaaaasp, the artist’s first public solo exhibition.
Born in London in 1992 and based in Berlin, the British-American artist explores notions of gender and interiority through scenes of psychological turmoil. The exhibition comprises a series of spatial installations and new paintings.
The Perimeter has been transformed across a multitude of time periods, each room unfolding as fragments of a cyclical narrative. Situated during the collapse of Victorian domesticity, these sites intersect with mid-20th century countercultural movements and contemporary visual signifiers. Layers of wallpaper and archival clippings are embedded as a patina in Metcalf’s set dressings. By incorporating historical and material references, she depicts England’s legacy of psychiatric spaces and public crises of care. These built interiors offer a segmented view inside a clinical enclosure; made up of waiting rooms, abandoned surgical theatres, and damp vinyl floors. In these works, she blurs the line between domestic and institutional interiors, obscuring the boundary between care and confinement.
There is an underlying sense of malaise throughout Metcalf’s paintings, where familiar scenes are contrasted by architectural decay and the banality of bureaucratic violence. As you pass through a stratum of transitory spaces, historical continuity is fractured, invoking the haunting anxiety of memory. Through exaggerated and psychedelic imagery, she oscillates between humour and darkness, a satire that remains deeply relevant to ongoing struggles around bodily autonomy and agency. For Metcalf, domesticity becomes a referential marker to the restriction of craft and ornamentation as a gendered art historical practice. Throughout the exhibition Metcalf challenges this reading by playing on a camp aesthetic, where the mundanity of a home meets the pathos of operatic storytelling.
Gaaaaaaasp is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, produced by The Perimeter, designed by Studio Boris Meister, with texts written by Jennifer Higgie and Alexandra Metcalf.
Alexandra Metcalf graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her work has recently been exhibited at No. 9 Cork Street, London; FRAC Corsica, Corte; Forde, Geneva; Kunsthalle Zürich; Champ Lacombe, Biarritz; 15 Orient Gallery, New York and Ginny on Frederick, London. Metcalf’s work is held in The Museum of Modern Art Library Collection, New York; The Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University, Providence and The Perimeter, London
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Main Website image:
A nurse (matron?) wagging her finger in displeasure. Watercolor by M. Bishop, ca 1959. Adamson Collection Trust / Wellcome Collection
