Lindsey Mendick – SH*T FACED

Four stars

 "Booze makes everything better", says Lindsey Mendick in her voiceover to Shame Spiral (2023), her twenty-minute warts and all gonzo film documenting a big night out and the morning after. "Until it makes everything worse". These lines are the driving force of Mendick’s debut show in Scotland, which charts her topsy-turvy relationship with alcohol. This is done in a monumental display that mines the dark underbelly of what lies beneath the surface of everyday politesse once a messy night on the lash has unleashed the beast within.

 

In the show’s title piece, Mendick draws from Dante’s Divine Comedy to create a ceramic-based model of a nightclub, one half of which shows off the calm before the storm as businessmen and hen parties unwind. The other half lays bare the depraved nightmare of what altered states can reveal. A full-size reimagining of a club bathroom sees similarly monstrous forces inveigle their way into assorted sinks as well as the under the influence psyches of those seeking sanctuary there.

 

I tried so hard to be good  (2023) looks to Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by way of twelve vases lined up on a mirrored table like dinner party guests, their torsos easily shattered shells of buttoned up Victoriana and a morass of excess.

 

While the depths of Mendick’s confessional confrontation with herself cannot be understated, neither can its elaborately honed sense of craft in a show that attempts to purge old demons as it calls time on the after hours excess that fires it. 

 

Jupiter Artland until 1^stOctober

The List, August 2023

 

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