315 Gallery is pleased to announce the first New York solo exhibition of British artist Phoebe Collings-James. ‘Expensive Shit’, opening 8th September, features a number of new works including sculp- tures, drawing and a site-specific audio installation.

Primordial Soup forms the center of this collection of work. The artist, currently researching and exploring specific themes of diasporic movement and transformation, presents an immersive audio piece, threading connections between place of birth, place of work, and sites of heritage. Global movement and insecurity, a theme explored in depth by the artist in Atrophilia (Company Gallery, 2016, with Jesse Darling), reoccurs in familiar materials: cargo nettings repurposed from their militarized sport aesthetic and used here as drap- ery or auxiliary support.

Further fragmentation occurs in the reflexive Mylar works Expensive Shit and Gossip Folks. The viewer’s gaze is reflected back, shattered into shards. These works and the sound of Primordial Soup take the listen- er into a similar position - approached by a haze of impression and moving focus. The use of a purpose built sound system is heightened here by the extreme use of stereo separation, much in keeping with the Sound System tradition of specialist equipment used for non-traditional emphasis of frequency.

Primordial Soup contains original vocal contributions from singer Amanda Khiri.

The artist explains a recurring theme of ‘diasporic fantasy’:

I use the term diasporic fantasy to describe a highly emotional and shifting position that is located in the inbetween place. As a conceptual location it allows a sense of wholeness that accepts its position as encompassing constant movement and change.
Reality can be full of rejection, frustration and pain. The fantasy space is somewhere that includes all of those elements too, but it is yours.

It lurks somewhere between the bricks and sky I have known - and the other that I have longed for - like some sort of sad twisted romance. In these works I have sought to establish sensations of home between the place I now live in New York, London as my birthplace and Kingston, Jamaica - specifically 11 Mile Bull Bay where my family’s yard still stands.