Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby

Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby’s shared practice is a space for the artist duo to explore the way images gain meaning through being shared and distributed between individuals both privately and through social media and the public sphere. Each artist has an individual practice and the gallery represents Majid’s solo practice along with Newby and Majid’s collaborative practice.

The duo collate images from many sources, both printed and online that range from magazines, porn sites, online forums and comics. The source images are mostly fast-moving and disposable, part of the constant flow of visual information that surrounds us. Majid and Newby’s practice slows these images down by destabilizing or de-anchoring the image through processes such as scanning, drawing and layering. The ongoing exchange of the same image between the two of them, that is then worked on by one of the duo at a time is also key here. 

Mediation then, might be seen as the key to understanding their practice, leading tor the transformation of images through a heightened or specific attention made to materiality. This might be the use of a material such as translucent resin cast from leather that appears like a skin overlaying the surface of an image, or using 16mm film to capture a sequence of AI generated images.  In their recent show at CCA Goldsmiths Majid and Newby used digital thermal-transfer printing software which changes data and noise into a series of almost imperceptible series of long lines.  The artists then copied these lines in hand in graphite pencil, taking it in turns to work.

There is a push-and-pull at work here in this example – on the one hand, there is an erasure of self in the laborious mechanical process that removes the traces of each artist’s individual identity in the finished works. But on the other hand there is something that affirms the way an individual can relate to another – as Newby has stated in an interview the duo’s collaboration began as “a literal text chain of two people trying to keep in touch.”

The space that Majid and Newby’s way of working opens up is in one sense temporal; it invites the viewer to spend more time considering an image than if it had been encountered in its original context. Looking changes from being passive to active and in doing so opens up the possibility of looking at something with a sense of recognition and even perhaps, desire. That the images that form the source material tend towards the subversive means that this moment of recognition can be rather surprising, not least to the viewer themselves. As the critic Matthew McClean notes: ‘to interpret ‘Contact (Bucks) – to ‘own it’ – I have to out myself as a certain type of person: one who spends enough time on the internet to know that mud porn is a thing.”