Alms For The Birds

Cabinet Gallery, London, UK
21 March – 26 April 2014

“Write down a desire,” comic book writer Grant Morrison advised in his wildly engaging talk at the 2000 DisinfoCon, “take out all the vowels and the repeated consonants, and turn that into an image that looks magical.” Coming up on drugs, speaking to a crowd of conspiracy theory devotees, Morrison describes a simple entryway into magic, trying to revive the sigil practices of people like artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, a spell of sorts meant to focus a wish into something realisable. “This shit works!” I tried it once. It didn’t work, but it says a lot about the self-fulfilling determination of magical adherents: if you’re looking for something hard enough, you’ll find it in some form. An undecipherable glyph of jumbled letters – an e, an i, a backwards c and k – painted in faded reds and blacks adorns the stained cloth banner of Elijah Burgher’s Mictlantecuhtli’s grin (2013), which presides over ‘Alms For The Birds’, an eight-person group show curated by artist (and Turner Prize nominee) James Richards. This compact but pleasurably elusive exhibition is filled with remnants, tokens and traces that, like Burgher’s sigil, leave us to imagine the desires and strange rituals that led these artists here.

‘Alms For the Birds’, installation view. Image courtesy the gallery.