Taking down the striplights at Charity

Roland Ross is pleased to present Taking Down the Striplights at Charity, a solo exhibition by Keith Farquhar at the shop Sadie Coles HQ. 

For this exhibition Farquhar navigates the sedimented layers of contemporary life by drawing from a personal archive of imagery amassed over a 30 year period. Through the technique of dye sublimation onto faux fur, these autobiographical and appropriated images have been reworked into a series of impressionistic compositions. 

What emerges is a network of influences that speaks not only to Farquhar’s individual trajectory but to the broader social and cultural systems within which he is embedded. Pedagogy, music, and the everyday encounters of an artist engaged in a larger matrix of social relations are inscribed in the work and gesture toward the structures that organise and define artistic production over time. 

The exhibition’s title, Taking Down the Striplights at Charity recalls a group of artist friends during the dismantling of a temporary lighting track at the artist-run space Charity in Glasgow, an attempt to evade detection for hosting covert exhibitions within their temporary, shared studio situation. What could pass as an easily overlooked event perfectly exemplifies the improvisational tactics that characterise Farquhar’s practice; a microcosm of resistance that mirrors the larger cultural logic of transience, bricolage, and repurposing of available means. 

The works’ faux fur surfaces, with their impressionistic qualities, evoke an aesthetic of ephemerality, capturing the fleeting nature of these events while disrupting conventional modes of representation. 

In Taking Down the Striplights at Charity, Farquhar presents a narrative that is at once personal and collective. His work maps the intersections of individual memory, social space, and historical contingency, offering a reflection on the ways in which art is shaped by and responds to the shifting structures of contemporary life. The exhibition invites us to consider how these overlooked relationships and transient gestures speak to broader questions of social and artistic practice.