Locusts of the Sickly Sun

An exhibition curated by Victoria Sharples. Featuring: Speculative Proxy, Alexandra Searle, Joel Wycherley.

Sharples’s curatorial project Locusts of the Sickly Sun explored the condition and aesthetics of material precarity and ecological unease through the sculptural and installation-based practices of Speculative Proxy, Alexandra Searle, and Joel Wycherley. Bringing together synthetic and organic substances – resin, polyurethane, mica, silicone, atomised rubber, LED panels, and more – the exhibition challenged the ontological separation of the biological and the technological, inviting the viewer to acknowledge an entangled, inseparable condition of synthetic bodies, biological simulations, and spectral remnants of industry. Each component extended beyond its surface properties to signal systems of extraction, slow violence (Nixon, 2013) and industrial entanglement, foregrounding materials as agential, semiotic bodies that call attention to, and affectively speculate on, our ecological and economic futures. By assembling these works, Locusts of the Sickly Sun presented a constellation of contemporary malaise, calling on the symbol of the locust (and the waning sun) as allegories of potential plagues and petrochemical afterlives. The exhibition posited that aesthetic sensibilities may be used a method to articulate that which is silenced – what might otherwise remain inaudible became material and felt, sensed and interpreted. Here, Sharples uses the exhibition space as a site of confrontation, a forecast and elegy: a reflection on the systemic forces that shape our collective futurity.

In Locusts of the Sickly Sun, Wycherley’s emergency exit sign became talismanic: its amber-cast resin panel emitting a glow that questioned the possibility of survival. Searle’s work – a suspended sculpture of pale-yellow glass, the colour of decline – remained poised in a state of cessation. And Speculative Proxy’s assemblage – an array of nodal sculptures made from appropriated industrial fragments and coated in silicone – called on the fictional material “Imipolex-G” from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), to introduce speculative fiction as a critical framework, a tactic often used by New Materialist scholars. Sharples’ Locusts of the Sickly Sun contributed to ongoing investigations into how exhibition-making can function as a method of research. It asks how curatorial practices may make visible the pervasive symptoms of systemic harm, and what is to come without change.

Supported by Sheffield City Council.