Assume Vivid Astro Focus Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, Shoplifter and
Cibelle Cavalli Bastos
Running Naked
16 October - 12 December 2015
TJ Boulting is delighted to present an exhibition of the collaboration between assume vivid astro focus, Cibelle
Cavalli Bastos and Shoplifter. The artists have known and collaborated with each separately in recent years but
this exhibition presents for the first time the three together. Most notably AVAF and Shoplifter created an installation
in the window of MoMA, New York in 2008, which filled the space with bright artificial hair braids and
neon lights. The same year Cibelle worked with AVAF for the 28th Biennial of Sao Paulo and in 2009 her video
performance was exhibited at the MOT, Tokyo as a part of AVAF’s collective installation. In 2012 Cibelle performed
inside the installation Shoplifter had created at The Clocktower in New York. For RUNNING NAKED
the three will combine and layer their different practices following their synchronicity and creative dialogues.
Colour is a major unifying force between the three. It is explored graphically in the constructed triptych painting
of avaf in the main room contrasting against the freeform freestyle wave of painting on epoxy resin by
Cibelle which lies on the floor before it. This twisted wave form curves upwards seamlessly towards Shoplifter’s
plastic sculpture ‘Underwater IV’ which in turn curves around the corner of the room. Almost imperceptible
aside from its slender green shadow is ‘Thoughtpicker’ by Cibelle, propped against the wall as a unifying formal
device between the larger wall-mounted works on either side.
The artists spent a week together in the space bringing together their individual works in an organic dialogue
and also created new works in response. The sugar cane sculpture ‘Smell Fest’ by Shoplifter is an addition to her
‘Imaginary Friend’ series, and echoes the existing botanical forms of the AVAF painting alongside it. Both Shoplifter
and Cibelle share a use of found materials and went together to Dalston and Peckham markets to source
the plastic tablecloths to use as materials for their work. Shoplifter’s were heated and shrunk to create her
sculptural colour forms, while Cibelle cut and layered the entire floor of the back room, using coloured duck
tape to define the grid formation and tagging with a graffiti pen in her trademark font as she went along. Found
materials extend also to the chain curtain by avaf that divides the two spaces, here they collected motifs used by
the public transport system in Paris and played around with the forms and colours in a series of curtains.
In installing their individual works together in one space the artists explored and discovered the natural parallels
between them, as you enter the back space the large voluptuous forms of avaf’s painted lady almost sit atop
visually the leg forms of Shoplifter’s ‘She-bang’ in the foreground, whilst viewed in reverse from the other end
of the room there is a natural symmetry between the legs with the ‘#Nudes’ sculpture of Cibelle and its similar
suggestion of female forms.
Other works have been created between the three artists unifying their similar aesthetics, two digital prints
on canvas of AVAF were detached from their stretchers, with synthetic hair forms and sculptures by Shoplifter
incorporated, the one in the back room disassembled and formed into a soft sculpture lying collapsed on the
floor, originally entitled ‘Vertigo Anxity’ here it has been reduced more than its original title could have ever
foreseen.
