Set against the backdrop of these troubled and uncertain times, THIS WORLD IS NOT FOR YOU continues Paul Yore’s anarchic approach to image-making, culminating in an installation of calculated decadence.

The exhibition presents a subversive body of work conceived over the past year, taking the form of laboriously hand-crafted quilts, needlepoint, assemblage, sculpture and video works. Yore excavates the mass materiality of consumer society, creating works that are brimming with borrowed images, icons, symbols and slogans pulled from both high and low culture. His archaeological approach to sourcing material uncovers the nightmarish dimensions of the present socio-political moment, whilst simultaneously imagining new paradigms: a hybrid world built from the rubble of capitalist excess.

Referencing classical art historical traditions such as Byzantine mosaics, grandiose history painting and public monuments, Yore questions the canonical claims to normativity of these forms and seeks to offers alternative models. In Yore’s hyperbolic and counter-factual works, images are literally held together by a thread. In this way, Yore seeks to illustrate the precariousness of contemporary society, and anticipates the inevitability of its collapse.

There’s no room for neutrality or quiet speculation in Yore’s work. His work is deliberately absurd, camp and trashy, drawing on the rich language of drag queens with baroque theatrics, bawdy humour and a strong anti-authoritarian streak. Yore’s practice positions emancipatory queerness as a necessary disruptive methodology, and art as a dynamic and discursive site of resistance and reimagining.