Commonwealth and Council presents Love Life II, an exhibition by P. Staff comprised of holographic poetry, an electrified wall, simulated stomach acid, and collages suspended in resin. Through sculpture, print, and poetry, Staff’s work reflects upon the volatile exchange between bodies, ecosystems, and institutions, from a queer and trans perspective. Their atmospheric installations exploit the corrosive capacities of acid, blood, and hormones in order to explore a sensuousness in which pleasure and violence co-exist.

Poetry has become an increasingly vital component of Staff’s work, by turns stream-of-consciousness, formally experimental, and intimate. A new holographic poem titled Love Life appears to vibrate and scroll through the air at the entrance of the exhibition. While the titular cliché at first evokes romance and platitudes, the text belies an eroticism that both dissolves and dissects:

          for what makes me

          wet

          is soluble

          what makes love sweat

          is

          soluble

          in an acrid

          sulphurous

          wet

          knife

          peeling

          back

          layers

          of

          rippling–

In their 2019 exhibition On Venus at the Serpentine Galleries, London, Staff installed a network of pipes that ran across the ceilings and walls of the gallery. These channels periodically dripped acid into industrial steel barrels, reminiscent of an institution's crumbling infrastructure and a collection of bodily fluids. This leaky containment, tinged with hazard, suggested desire as contaminant and the queer/trans body as its vector. For this exhibition, the barrels, bearing the scars of their 2019 showing, have been flattened and reconstituted to form the works On Living, Still. Coated in layers of automotive lacquer, temporary tattoos are printed on each sheet—dissected animals, a series of bodily examinations—layered on the flayed skin of acid-eroded steel.

Dividing the gallery is a newly-constructed wall papered with an image—a lone, bedridden figure covering their face—confronting the viewer. An erratic, inch-deep gash in the wall defaces its surface, clicking and pulsing like a fresh wound. Closer inspection reveals a strand of electric fencing embedded within the wall, appropriated from its common carceral and punitive use against animals and humans alike. The work, titled À Travers Le Mal, continues Staff’s interest in deploying choreographed, corporeal danger within subtle architectural intervention.

To Live a Good Life presents a series of fluorescent prints encased in resin, surrounded by various materials such as the artist’s hair, dead insects, ash, and sulfur. The central prints depict heavily manipulated images of unseen bodies wrapped and enshrouded in an elusive ritual. On Gravity is an imposing sculptural installation of large black boxes—which the artist describes as voids—again dividing the space architecturally. Amongst the boxes are stacked pink blush towels pillowing glass bottles filled with a simulation of the artist’s stomach acid. Here, their body may be read as at once violently present in the room, and stretched into the infinite; tender and wet, sulfurous, acrid, and dissolving.

P. would like to thank: Isabelle Albuquerque, Hana Cohn, Candice Lin, Jordan Loeppki-Kolesnik, Mad Luellen, Audrey Min, Lucas Morin.

P. Staff (b. 1987, UK; lives and works in Los Angeles and London) studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009), and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at LUMA, Arles (2021); ICA Shanghai (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2018); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at 59th Venice Biennale (2022); 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021); 47 Canal, New York (2021); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); and Gasworks, London (2016) among otheres. They are the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019) and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists (2015) and have participated in residencies at FD13, Minneapolis (2018); LUX, London (2014); The Showroom, London (2014); Fogo Island Arts, Canada (2012); and Banff Centre, Canada (2010).