Andrew Reed Gallery announces Nimby, Sam Creasey’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The London-based artist mines from his own employed life in delivery logistics as an influence bank and as a psycho-geographical adventure into the lives and localities of various microcosms of city life. ‘Nimbyism’ (not in my back yard!) is one of the most widely used acronyms for those anxious of change if it is local to them, while oblivious to it if it is not. The title for the show takes on the personality of someone who is ill-equipped for the changes in the landscape around them. Over time, places and space change and morph in waves of sprawling expansion and contraction; we are but mostly powerless to stop it. Creasey posits how the show’s change-wary protagonists grapple with this entropy.

 

Several of the paintings in Nimby take inspiration from architectural renderings displayed on the exteriors of building sites as we wander past, curious of what will lie behind the wall. Architects, designers, and stakeholders laud the design tools employed before construction begins, espousing that they ultimately led to better design and more successful urban environments. But, as we see in First Time Buyers, Wharf!, Sound of the Underground, and A Harmonious Blend of Cutting Edge Design and Timeless Elegance, the end result often is cold, homogenous, and purely functional in ideology. A multitude of perspectives in these works enhances the sense of disjointedness and unease. Row houses – which Creasey renders in painstaking detail – are juxtaposed with towering new skyscrapers. 

 

A Harmonious Blend of Cutting Edge Design and Timeless Elegance lends a personal narrative to this grand scale of hyper-development. The artist is a lifelong supporter of Charlton Athletic, whose very future as a club was nearly in jeopardy a few years ago when it became public that the owner of the club was attempting to capitalize on the land and the stadium for a housing development. The title of the work, engraved into the sides of the artist-made frame, comes from the proposed development pitch. 

 

In other works in Nimby, Creasey embeds and builds off of motifs and histories within the United Kingdom. Leaving Town depicts a truck driving through a rural road, the vehicle advertising its troupe of carnival performers. Doldrums features geese previously incorporated in the artist’s practice, the birds’ physicality heightened via Creasey’s use of plaster. These birds wreak havoc on a crowd of people immersed in a swirling sea, reminding us of the country as an island nation. And Sentinels, with its turbines now manipulating by a man and precariously balanced upon by a woman, speaks to the days of Britain as a titan of industry. 

 

Creasey also incorporates ceramic into his practice for the first time. This body of paintings contains an urge to oscillate between perspectives and break out of the confines of the singular perspectival composition, thus paving the way for physical objects to follow. ‘Despatch’ – as the suite of five ceramic works are all titled – is taken by the artist from boxes of the same name which were originally used by UK Members of Parliament to carry government documents. Relief imagery cast across each box lid refers to the subject matter also explored in Creasey’s paintings. As fragile and ornate vessels which are otherwise improper for many uses, Creasey’s ceramic works take on the same meaning over time as the parliamentary dispatch boxes which sit idly in the chamber and in MP’s offices atop polished desks. They are ears and eyes and they sit there, heavy, steadfast, but empty: as witnesses. In so doing, Creasey’s work imbues a Surrealist element to the global phenomenon of urban development while also explicitly referencing his British background.