What d’ya think this is, a hotel?! by Mia Wilkinson

What d’ya think this is, a hotel?! Usually a question asked in a home, not a hotel. The familiar domestic accusation takes on a different meaning in the context of Wilkinson’s two-month residency at art’otel London Hoxton.

Working across painting and sculpture, Wilkinson examines the body as a site of social and political negotiation, where ideas of gender, class, sexuality and belonging are constructed, inherited and contested. Domestic space operates throughout her practice not simply as a setting, but as an ideological structure: a place where behaviours are learned, roles assigned and distinctions between public and private become increasingly unstable.

The residency extends these concerns into the peculiar territory of temporary domesticity. Neither entirely public nor private, the hotel offers an approximation of home in which intimacy is manufactured, comfort is transactional and the ordinary conditions of domestic life are reorganised. Occupation becomes temporary, ownership ambiguous, and the boundaries between leisure, labour and service are continually redrawn.

Bringing together work developed throughout Wilkinson’s two-month residency, the exhibition extends her ongoing investigations into the body, domestic space and the social structures that govern both. Through exaggerated figuration, dense painterly surfaces and an irreverent visual language, Wilkinson examines how bodies inhabit, negotiate and challenge the spaces and ideologies that seek to define them.

What d’ya think this is, a hotel?! presents a continuation of Wilkinson’s wider investigation into the social architectures that shape our bodies, behaviours and desires, reframed within a space that occupies the uneasy territory between home, commerce and temporary residence.

Exhibition Opening Party: 4 November | 6pm-10pm 

Exhibition: 4 – 21 November