Josie Perry and Francis Jones: The Thieves

‘The Thieves’ is a collaborative exhibition by Josie Perry and Francis Jones. The show centres around a series of colour pencil drawings and a hybrid-form social science fiction text, presented as a publication and an audioscape. The story follows a commune living on the outskirts of a rapidly expanding neoliberal city, narrated by four individuals who have been unofficially exiled due to their refusal to conform to the city’s work standard, which rejects communality, compassion and pleasure. The narrators explain how they came to form the commune and imagine alternative means of living together.

In the audioscape, fragments of ‘the Thieves’ are voiced by Gloria Dawson, Hussein Mitha, Isaac Harris and Nat Lall, who have each contributed a text of their own to the publication, and are also visually depicted in four character portraits. These contributors were invited to join the project due to resonances between ‘the Thieves’ and their own creative practices, and the fictional characters have been loosely based on real friendships. In this sense, the project as a whole can be understood as analogous to the story’s narrative of sociality, and is a homage to our queer and creative communities in Glasgow.

Opening

Join us for an opening on Friday 2nd February, 6pm - 9pm, then open 11am-6pm Tue-Sat.

Josie Perry

Josie Perry is a Glasgow-based artist working mainly with drawing. Since 2019 she has worked on the collaborative project ‘Plasma Spring’ with Daphne Simons, which centres around a series of comics and related exhibitions fictionalising figures from art history and pop culture through an irreverent queer lens. The most recent instalment of the comic, 'Plasma Spring: Halloweel,' was published by Glom Press in 2022 and followed by a solo presentation of related drawings at San Mei Gallery (London) in 2023.

Francis Jones

Francis Jones is a writer and artist from Ireland, living in London. Their pamphlet sacrificial fabric was published by SPAM in 2021. They wrote a short experimental film “I Thought I Hated U, Moon Snail” in collaboration with artist Jack Hogan for the final exhibition of the Whitney ISP, New York, which was also screened at the Colloquium Unpopular Culture at NYU in May 2023. hey have written poetry in response to exhibitions by Sam Keogh, at Primary Gallery, Nottingham, and Hamish Chapman at Robert’s, Glasgow (both 2023). Their work has been otherwise published by Gutter, MAP, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere.