The truck-size lobster is breaking through the end of the world. His claws, with pincers already trussed for the cooking pot, are ripping through a banner of summery cloud-flecked sky. He wants out...
The truck-size lobster is breaking through the end of the world. His claws, with pincers already trussed for the cooking pot, are ripping through a banner of summery cloud-flecked sky. He wants out. Filling the Hayward Gallery’s Project Space, Big Lobster Supper is the centrepiece of the young London-based artist Jess Flood-Paddock’s show, Gangsta’s Paradise. The crustacean’s body, built from wood and coated in fiery paint, makes a pithy invitation to “consider the lobster", as the late writer David Foster Wallace put it in his famed essay, which envisions the seafood delicacy as the victim a barbaric society destined to be condemned by future generations.
Lumbering and awkward, Flood-Paddock’s giant shellfish cuts a tragicomic figure, typical of her series of Gangsta’s Paradises, where people have tried to perfect the world with their own personal, sullied Eden. The banner that envelopes the gallery walls replicates the trick border that marks “the end of the world” from the movie the Truman Show, the boundary between Jim Carey’s reality TV universe and another reality: what lies beyond. A two-metre-high copy of sports star, and would-be everyman, Michael Johnson’s painfully misconceived autobiography-come-self-help tome, Slaying the Dragon, stands like a monument to human vanity. Traced onto a wall is a giant rabbit of the type the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il decided to import from Germany in 2007 to feed his starving populace, though he apparently ate all the rabbits before this weird farming programme could be put into action.
This show is full of things being devoured. A Victorian anthropologist’s dinner invitation, featuring his own photo of a group of indigenous people in Australia’s Torres Strait, bears the caption “cannibals,” which seems as likely to be his little joke as truth. Whether cultural cannibalism or literal cannibalism, Flood-Paddock’s network of totems and allusions shows us an eat-or-be-eaten world, whose foundations can be as easily built up or torn down as a sheet of paper.
Jess Flood-Paddock’s show, Gangsta’s Paradise is at the Hayward Project Space, London until September 19.
