“The Missing O and E” is a new commission and first solo presentation by London-based artist, poet, and writer Joshua Leon. Leon’s text-led processes produce artworks and exhibitions that bind memoir with historical research. Spanning sculpture and sound, the installation traces a collapsing of personal memory and historical record to offer a nuanced exploration of Jewish life.
Three letters—C H N—are visible from nearby on Grove Road. Inlaid into the side of Chisenhale’s building in c. 1940, Leon’s exhibition tends to this sign, to reveal an otherwise ellipsed history. Two, possibly missing, letters—an O and an E—have been stained into the gallery’s windows. Like a form of annotation, the last name of the building’s former owner, Morris Cohen, is restored onto the building’s surface, returning a forgotten history to the site.
Interpreting instances in which one’s name might be erased, transformed, or deliberately withdrawn, “The Missing O and E” recognises misnomers, codes, and ellipses as both socially imposed and politically intentional. Leon works with glass and veneer—the latter evoking the building’s history as a former veneer factory—to materially explore appearance and disappearance; asking what is at stake when a person, community, or history is hidden or made visible? Nine wall-mounted frames, constructed using veneer salvaged from the building’s manufacturing years, ask what’s in a name? Viewed through yellow stained glass, each contains a music programme detailing the gradual alteration of Leon’s own grandfather’s name—at times imposed, at others desired.
A single speaker emits the second violin part from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a composition played by Leon’s grandfather while in the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1950s. By isolating a single instrument, Leon amplifies one voice, otherwise concealed in the cacophony of the orchestra. Two “f” shaped veneered benches evoke the holes on a violin; amplification devices that become support structures for listening. As the piece oscillates between sound and silence, visitors are invited to listen to which voices can and cannot be heard.
Leon’s first publication, titled The Process, will be released in April 2024, co-published by Chisenhale Gallery and Mousse Publishing.
at Chisenhale Gallery, London
until April 21, 2024