Habitual Submission - Rhiannon Salisbury

Article: Jas Bhachu
Foreword: Delphian Gallery 

Delphian Gallery is delighted to present ‘Habitual Submission’, a solo show by London-based artist, Rhiannon Salisbury. Her work investigates the glossy representation of women to expose an absurd dystopian reality of the capitalist dream.

Her process begins from selecting through an archive of advertisement imagery sourced through high-end beauty campaigns online and magazines. The resulting paintings show the disturbance caused by the social pressures born of the mass media machine. The images morph into a synthetic chaotic mush which seeks to simultaneously allure and repel the viewer. In decontextualizing the original image through the subjective lens of painting, Salisbury engages with an otherwise unobtainable dialogue of beauty.

Inspired by serious literary and philosophical works such as The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rhiannon decontextualises and distorts the vernacular image in such a way to render it eerily familiar, yet entirely alien.

‘Habitual Submission’ aims to disrupt and reclaim the omnipresent space these luxurious images occupy - a feminist manifesto for our current times. Rhiannon was the overall winner of our second Delphian Open Call, beating over 10,000 entries.

Rhiannon Salisbury:

"I use my paintings as a tool to investigate the role of women within a patriarchal culture. Using colour, form, and composition as language, I am investigating western standards of beauty and the idealisation of female adolescence, within the field of advertising.

I deliberately work with found imagery from aspirational fashion and lifestyle magazines, focusing on the modelling campaigns of the most luxurious brands. Composition’s and imagery are tweaked to distort and expose my dystopian perception of this capitalist dream.

I hope that the reinterpretation of the advertisements through painting, opens up a dialogue where one can re-look at the structure of ideas and references used in each highly constructed and saturated image.

Using gestures which explore the borderland between a substance that is alluring in its thick luscious texture, and grotesque in its ability to turn to chaotic mush, my paint handling and synthetic colour palette seeks to strike a balance that intends to at once allure and repel the viewer."    

Private view: 26th of September 2019, 6 - 9pm
Show Run: 27th Sept – 8th Oct 2019
Address: 253 Hoxton Street, London N1 5LG
Website: delphiangallery.com