Visited Cell Projects for the two person show by Rosa Aiello and Patricia L. Boyd titled ‘Join’. As its title suggests, the work in the exhibition is preoccupied with connections and overlapping structures, be they material, political or simply thresholds between different spaces. On opening the door into the gallery, Rosa Aiello’s ‘Untitled (Blasey Ford)’ begins with an edited segment of the recent sexual assault testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. Very jarring and shocking but being forced to listen intently to content of this nature makes you think about it differently. Stripped away of all reference to the perpetrators, the audio becomes a list of interior spaces: “the stairwell, the living room, the bedroom … in close proximity”. Mimicking the female voices and interactions of smart-home devices such as Alexa and Google Home, this quietly powerful invitation not only heightens the drama of entering a new interior; but foregrounds the power structures and gender relations that pervade these room typologies. Objects are hacked, re-cast or transfigured to subvert their original function throughout the exhibition. Opposite Aiello’s work is Patricia L Boyd’s ‘Treatment’, an industrial fan that has been manipulated to run at a slow, functionless speed. Directly facing the viewer on entering the space, its presence is ominuous, a droning hum promising a return to full speed that never arrives. Works such as ‘Aeron Armrest I-XII’ instead take negative casts of chairs and turn-table feet, using organic materials such as restaurant grease to disrupt the clean industrial forms of the cast objects themselves. The whole show had a very concise feel; everything was of a high production value and fitted together well.
