francEsca dobbe

A YOUNG Girl’s party is a flop and no one cares

20th March - 19th April 2023 | Artist Talk 4pm 23rd March in W02

THE WORK

For her solo exhibition A Young Girls Party is a Flop and No One Cares, Dobbe presents the remnants of a birthday party. Assembled in the centre of the gallery space two plastic garden chairs stand facing away from each other, with six 3D printed balloons settled deflated at their legs. Here the synthetic materiality of the PVC chair set meets a digitally aided attempt to endow plastic with the quality of being sentimental. A photographic stillness pervades the exhibition, accentuated by a polaroid photograph displayed on the gallery’s back wall. It shows a poor image of a home movie, made through the process of distilling a still image from a moving one.

BIO

Francesca Dobbe (b.1997) lives and works in London. Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at South London Gallery, London (2023); Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2022); and Der Neue Kunstraum, Düsseldorf (2021).’

HER PRACTICE

In her artistic practice, Francesca Dobbe engages with notions of para-cinema through utilising the codes of both photography and cinema to consider how slowness - a product of the dialectical intimacy between each medium - is used as an aesthetic for picturing the everyday. In deploying slowness as both a critical and formal medium, her work explores how slowness enacts a politically resonant recognition of that which goes unrecognised under our contemporary temporal regime. Most recently, she has extended this logic into considering how sculpture can be recalibrated through para-cinematic slowness.

@francesca_dobbe_