Gili Tal
The Cascades Plus

For the Christmas break Cabinet Gallery will be closed from Saturday 21 December - Wednesday 8 January inclusive.

Gili Tal’s exhibition will reopen on Thursday 9 January and run until 25 January 2025

Exhibition dates
28 November 2024 - 25 January 2025
Thursday - Saturday, 12.00 - 6.00pm

C A B I N E T
132 Tyers Street
London SE11 5HS
art@cabinet.uk.com
www.cabinet.uk.com

     The Cascades was an exhibition first shown in 2020-21 at Kunstverein Braunschweig eV. It consisted of a series of pictures, now here, of a repeated motif simulating rain and stock-image style graphics. Rendered in various shades of blue and stamped with a washed out Shutterstock watermark logo, the works evoke both windows looking out and street-view sights of newly constructed buildings, and the play of light, water and shadow on glass - an effect explicitly reproduced by the aluminium cladding styles of numerous contemporary facades.The modular double-wall application of these kinds of facades are valued for their propensity for improving a building’s weather resistance while achieving immediately recognisable and distinctly contemporary designs. As such, the pictures were hung last time in irregular chequerboard overlays of the gallery walls, creating a second skin indifferent to the architecture underneath. Suspended in mid-air over windows, entrances and exits, they appeared to float.Whether or not this anti-gravity conceit could be described as any kind of pure imagistic digital transcendence, this layering effect did recall a series of browser windows left open on a screen. In part this returned the work to the the digital space where it, like the buildings, were conceived, pertaining to the relationship between the supposed charismatic authority of digital renderings of new spaces or buildings and how we experience them on the ground.

     For The Cascades +, the artist has added the + sign to the title. The + sign being a lazy default in digital media branding to signify additional content as well as services which were often previously consumed for free.The + denotes that there’s something worth paying for, which makes it valuable enough to choose over Netflix, and by relying on the heft of the brand preceding it, it has the added benefit of not blowing the marketing budget explaining what it’s about. Released from their chequerboard constellations, the Rainscreen Wash pictures now accept the gallery’s architecture and enter into a more straightforward hang. A giant pixellated bus painting, similar to those shown in Tal’s recent exhibitions, You May See Butterflies: Elephant Park, Castle Square and Elephant Springs, (2023), has also been added, hovering high in the air. Plus, on the floor, there are three granite bollards, as well as a naturalistic scatter of fuzzy cut-out images. Hazy buildings, Chuppa Chup wrappers, phones and some aspects of indoor furnishings appear here and there around the gallery, like detritus, softening the edges.

- Oliver Corino, 2024