It’s been quite the year for the South London-based sculptor. Besides fronting the cover of Frieze magazine’s October issue, he’s also just opened a solo show at Camden Art Centre, taking over the space with several austere assemblages of otherwise mundane objects. From the outside, they’re formalistic, a little perturbing, and elusive. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and the queer, metropolitan references come to the fore.
Taking cues from the pressure, anticipation and release that might characterise gay cruising and life in a city where space is capital, the artist mainlines this very tension into his works, stretching sheer materials or wrapping cold steels to give an air of imminent release, climax and flux. For Art Basel Paris, Jack presents an equally precarious structure Allowance (2024), comprising two sousaphones (essentially, a larger iteration of the tuba) centred by a starched street lamp, complete with resin bubbles. Suspended from the ceiling, each sousaphone is wrapped in clear PVC, hoicked into place with metal wires.
“So much of my work has been shaped by a shifting sense of instability in London,” says Jack. “You can see in quite a lot of pieces, this kind of honesty around how things are made. Within an instant, things could collapse or be taken apart.” Elsewhere in Capitain Petzel gallery’s booth, a horn, a white stocking and electrical cables are contorted into one unnerving sculpture, spray painted where the horn tapers out. Entitled Lead Eye (2024), this is yet another taste, alongside Allowance, of what’s to come at the artist’s next solo in January 2025 for the Berlin-based gallery.
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