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Free & Easy

Free & Easy was a solo show of twelve paintings and objects. Through the integration of image, object and text the exhibition investigated the impact of the rapidly industrialising United States of America on the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovski as recorded in his travel diaries in the 1920s.

The title of the exhibition derives from a phrase used by Mayakovski and the paintings are particularly informed by the social-political critique and East-West tensions present in a poem from his diary called Brooklyn Bridge. The underpinning research behind the show centred on this poem and investigated ways in which textual elements could be incorporated into the abstract relationship of colours and marks in the paintings and combined with the found objects (three chairs), which formed part of the exhibition.

The relationship between these component elements was deliberately complex: one chair was rammed up against the wall and another was wrapped, a reminder that in human consciousness there is no absolute distinction between actual space and psychological space. These have to be understood together, just as the material and highly worked surfaces of the paintings and the various contradictory spaces that they imply or imagine need to be grasped in relationship to each other.

Chevska gave a series of talks in the gallery about the ideas behind the exhibition, which was reviewed in The Guardian (14-20 March 2009), Time Out (23-29 April 2009) and Turps Banana (October 2009). In advance of the opening, she explored the ways in which both music and art seek to cross boundaries and foster social-political awareness in an interview with Michael Berkeley on the programme Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 (1 June 2008), focusing on early twentieth-century modernists and the contemporary Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina.