With Placebo Placebo Effect, Chou takes the notion of the double, substitute or sham to embody alternate approaches to representation and reproduction. In her world of determinedly handmade reproduction, these sculptures appear to function in a parallel place, between forms of recognition and displacement, only loosely connected to the stand-in. They are also “deferrals of a demand to appear”, Chou explains – decoys that can lure you aside, or “antidotes to the fallacy of seeing-as-believing”. Considering the placebo as a sculptural strategy, the works propose to remove a body from its typical use or labour value and place it, quite literally, beside itself.
The sausage has become a recurring motif in Chou’s practice: a commonplace food form made strange through its associations with appetite, mass production and comic excess. Its familiarity offers a way to approach questions of embodiment and collective life indirectly, rather than through literal figuration. Carved and cast, these works often sit amongst a wealth of everyday construction and domestic paraphernalia, exploring how bodies – whether the corporeal body, the everyday object, or the work of art itself – are assembled, separated and made legible through material processes. As individual components within a carefully constructed system, the shifts between wood, flesh and bronze set up a wider enquiry into instability, substitution and the social life of objects.
The exhibition will present a new series of hand-carved wooden sausages alongside their reproductions, as close to identical as can be achieved by means of chiselling, whittling and sanding. The painstaking attempt to reproduce each form also introduces a tension between handmade labour and the logic of industrial repetition: an effort to produce sameness that can never quite escape difference. Hosted in sculptural scenarios that highlight their doubling through different states of dis-/re-placement, each sculpture will speak to its own alternative, a suggestion of an(other) body, a defective teleportation that dislocates self from self.
Placebo Placebo Effect offers an imprecise doubling in which the distinction between original and substitute remains unsettled – somewhere between the real thing and its side effect.
Sabrina Chou is an artist from Los Angeles, California currently based in London. She holds a PhD in fine art from the Ruskin School of Art, and is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies Fine Art at Central Saint Martins.
Coleman Project Space, 94 Webster Road, London, SE16 4DF.
19 September – 18 October
Times: Fri – Sun 12 – 6
