Gallery 138 - December - 2025

Exhibition Title: Mass

Exhibitor: Thomas Pendergast

Exhibition text by Caroline Scales: 

It is a reflex to even mention that history tells us more about the present than the past. What arrives to us as history is less a repository of rupture and reinvention than a domesticated version of events, arranged into a colourful diorama that forms the backdrop to arts current impasse. The grand teleological arc of progress, crisis and renewal survives as a set of ready-made styles, the canon aestheticised and circulated as design. The question is no longer how to continue the project we have inherited, but rather how to work inside the remains of an activity that has collapsed into templates, where recollection aggregates into repetition. 

Alluding to this crisis, Pendergast’s ready-made books turn their backs to us like orphaned colour fields, retaining only the shell of historical promise. Their emptied surfaces mimic late modern formalism while signalling a contemporary condition in which the past reaches us as a pre-metabolised, redacted, infantilised palette.

The poodle prints respond to this impasse. Their repetition and mild absurdity underscore the small, mundane silliness of daily life, always slightly at odds with the vast human and historical experience they inhabit. Through absorbing every colour in the room, they reorganise the canon’s residues into a chaotic, drifting mass; a possible, if uncertain, path through the end of art’s narrative.

Artist Bio: 

Thomas Pendergast is an artist whose practice explores how art operates within the deadlock of critique and complicity, tracing the ways desire, narrative and value circulate through aesthetic forms. Drawing on interests in path dependency, actor-network theory and the economics of cultural production, Pendergast investigates how art might continue to act within conditions that both demand significance and undermine it, treating the dissolution of inherited meaning as a generative void, an emancipated ground from which art might reorient itself.