Parallel Parallel

with Kym Ellery & Jedda Daisy Culley

12 September — 9 November 2024

Parallel Parallel is truly a duo show as Kym ELLERY and Jedda-Daisy CULLEY became friends on the other side of the world, in Perth, Australia, when, both students in Art and Design, they reorganized their apartment into two distinct studios. Parallel, the exuberant energy of Jedda and the focused concentration of Kym harmonized in a mutual enrichment. Twenty years later, we have the chance to find them together again in Paris. Two complementary energies that evoke fire and water, dance and meditation, but also the fulfillment of the affirming forces of a new generation of women who live without contradiction their lives as creators, women, and mothers in full societal consciousness.

Kym Ellery has been a Parisian for about ten years. She first created the fashion brand ELLERY, widely recognized internationally, and then the economic reorganizations brought about by the global pandemic allowed her to open a new chapter in her creative life. Since 2023, she has been developing pieces of collectible design. The predominant element is metal—inox, brass, metallic resin—but the almost brutal aspect of her works is tempered by the lightness of curves that the eye and body easily embrace. No sharp edges, but fluidities and refined surfaces. Seats, kinetic sculptures, and candelabras seem barely placed on the ground, on the verge of levitation. The shapes are wide, enveloping. To this softness, these meditative works of art, presented for the first time, add the projection of a point of agreement that seems to reach your heart to perhaps calm it better with their slightly convex organic balance. For all of Kym Ellery's creations bear the hallmark of a profound knowledge of bodies and emotions and an aspiration to a subtle spirituality. The objects orient themselves on earth-sky axes, constructed within the paradoxes of the timeless and the disruptive. Metal is intimately linked to the divine spark, to the forces of the spirit, and to evoke the purpose of Kym Ellery's design sculptures, one is tempted to borrow this phrase from the catalog that Jérôme Neutres, who acquired her "Loveseat," dedicated to Bill Viola's work: "it approaches the practice of meditation, which consists of focusing on the present moment, concentrating one's gaze to go further in the perception of a subject." Kym exhibited at Théma in 2023, at the Art Paris fair in 2023 with the Hélène Bailly gallery. She will participate with them in the Art Geneva fair in 2025 as well as at the MATTER AND SHAPE salon in March 2025 in Paris.

"I am the wound and the knife." This verse from "L’Héautontimorouménos" by Charles Baudelaire could perfectly define the artistic approach of Jedda-Daisy Culley, for it is at the very heart of the appalling realism of a very contemporary story that the anger of the gentle Jedda-Daisy Culley takes root, and it is with all the weapons of painting that she fights. The grand manifesto canvas of this exhibition is certainly the very green A Picnic, a Scene, This is Spiritual Warfare, which pays homage to Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet. The famous painting is also known as The Bath or The Square Party, and it is indeed through a forced bath, in a terrible nocturnal shipwreck, that this creative anger was born.

"I know. I’m angry because I understand, not because I don’t," wrote English playwright Sarah Kane. Becoming the executioner of oneself in Jedda's paintings is to embody those immense aliens, mutants born of an oversized consciousness. The Alien is a woman who knows what it means to give life and who will protect it at all costs. To stay alive and defend the life that an exploitative system seeks to control to the point of destroying it. On the scale of this planetary trauma, and oh how individual, resilience will be psychic, corporeal, and etheric, showing itself as a sparkling phasmid, ready to shake the ground of exhausted common rationalities.

She marks her style with a ponytail, a brush-tail that she doubles with the sign of a generational, gendered, sexual, ecological, and animal crisis. The titles of the works are important, combative discourses, open like poems, sharp like knives. For everything cracks under the battering of Jedda-Daisy Culley, the flatness of the canvases, established hierarchies, the rules of decorum, and above all, the patriarchal psyche and its now derisory attributes.

Jedda-Daisy Culley has widely exhibited across Australia: Unbodied, Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney (2023); Download Hats, Jerico Contemporary, Sydney (2022); Fairy’s Frogs and Big Angry Floating Babies, Cool Change Contemporary, Perth, Australia (2021); Pls send pics this feels one-sided, Cement Fondu Project Space, Sydney (2021). She is collected by the Sherman Centre for Contemporary Ideas, Australia. The artist holds a Master of Fine Arts (UNSW) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction (UNSW). This is her first exhibition in Europe.

– Sophie Boursat*, September 2024

* Sophie Boursat is a writer, photographer, and visual artist. She has published two books, “L’eau et l’huile” with Sabine Wespieser in 2003 and “34 centimes, la minute” with Éditions du Canoë in 2021. She regularly writes for artists and has collaborated for several years with the activities of L’Observatoire de l’Art Contemporain.