Bloc Billboard: June Lam

22 March – 30 June

Free & Open to All

We are delighted to present A Study of Suspension, the first Bloc Billboard Commission of 2021 by artist and actor June Lam. Come pay it a walking visit outside our gallery on Eyre Lane.

The piece comprises audio as well as visual components: you can view the piece and/or listen to a recording of the poem, depending on where you are.

June’s latest collage work began during the COVID-19 pandemic as his artistic practice became confined to the home. Cutting, pasting, and overlaying analogue images, his collages set familiar human and animal parts in disorienting topographies of more-than (or not-quite) sea, sky, and land. The scenes quiver with yearning, even as the disembodied subjects find themselves in environments that do not promise immediate reciprocity.

A Study of Suspension foregrounds desire for touch and intimacy during times of contagion. It brings together June’s visual, writing and performance practices for the first time to expand the ways in which we can connect, even as we remain socially distanced.

the hanged figure
‘suspension is a dancer in a nebulous zone’
slight bend in the knee, toes pointed downward
pliable and wilful,
hands folded and eyes lifting
for the hanged figure suspension is the acceptance of eventual descent
suspension is potentiality
suspension is heaviness
gravity enveloping
he wilts,
shedding teary petals
what rises upward
settles
algae follows the drifting sideways light

June Lam, 2021

June Lam (b. 1990) is an Australian-born multidisciplinary of Chinese and Vietnamese ancestry, living in London and working across sculpture, performance and dance and most recently, collage. Recent artistic collaborations include Raisa Kabir’s A House Made of Tin (A Socially Distanced Weaving Performance), Ford Foundation Gallery, New York (2020), Dylan Spencer Davidson’s Affective Dynamics Study Group, Volksbühne, Berlin (2020), the UK debut staging of Nedko Solakov’s A Life (Black & White), Tate Modern, London (2020); Yvonne Rainer’s We Shall Run for London Contemporary Music Festival, Ambika P3, London (2018). He is currently undertaking a three-month associate artist residency with Asia Arts Activism and Raven Row.