#3_ Richie Culver's Coping
A world, where even resilience is something to be bought and sold
In Coping, which ran from 17 February - 15 March; Culver presented a world where labour, identity, and hardship are inextricably bound together in neoliberal framework. It’s about performance and we’re players on it’s stage.
We were left with fundamental questions: what does it mean to create art about labour while navigating an industry that thrives on exclusivity and self-promotion?
Is endurance a form of power or another form of submission, and is self-mythologising necessary for survival?
Richie Culver is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Hull whose work explores the intersections of class, gender, masculinity, and the digital age. Working across installation, poetry, and sound; his practice is often autobiographical - reflections on the ghosts.
Culver’s work has always contemplated ideas of eponymous-branding and corporate personification; shifting between notions of what really lives and what truly dies.
Coping was a stark look into the pervasive influence of corporate imagery on everyday life. His variation of the Omini Kappa logo, bordering a blank canvas, is like a corporate prayer.
In Richie’s world, life exists on the edge, and death is an inescapable truth. A stock image of carcasses hanging in an abattoir decorates the space. Is it background noise or a glimpse behind the curtain: exposing the mechanics of consumption and commodification?
Richie’s practice sits at the junction of sincerity and cynicism, where working class struggle is both lived and leveraged. It’s all for sale. Our bodies, our identities, our graft.
The questions that linger:
Is Coping, survival and adaptation, or is it simply just another form of labour?
What does it mean to endure and who profits from that endurance?
More form Richie soon in the meantime::
🚨 Check out Richie’s Work: Instagram
🎧 Listen to: Measurement and Measures Ment by Straight Panic & Quiet Husband
What were your thoughts on this exhibition?
