Exterior of Aspex Portsmouth by photographer Daniel Boss

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About

Aspex exists to support emerging artists, expose the creative process, and engage new audiences with visual art.

It achieves this by delivering an exciting and varied programme of exhibitions, off-site projects and participation events. Aspex's aim is to make the creation and enjoyment of art a more inclusive activity.

For the last 40 years, the gallery has supported sensational artists at the early stages of their careers. Artists such as Mona Hatoum, Richard Wilson and Susan Collis, all now internationally acclaimed, received support from Aspex.

Today, it continues to offer the next generation of contemporary visual artists a platform from which to launch their careers.

Keep up to date with exhibitions, events and workshops via the website: aspex.org.uk.

The Temperament Index

19 January - 1 April 2024

Aspex Portsmouth's latest exhibition is The Temperament Index - the latest incarnation of Melanie Jackson’s travelling project 'Spekyng Rybawdy'.

In this installation, the viewer is invited to wander amongst projected animations; cut-out figures and body parts; handmade clay objects; drawings, and more. Jackson has rallied together a procession, a carnival of conceptual nomads that jostle and jive, pleasure, fight and take flight across a trans-historical plane of existence, in which we are as much participants as voyeurs.

Jackson’s characters draw from historical Pilgrim badges - small cast tin or lead alloy brooches that were mass-produced in the mediaeval period and sold along pilgrim routes, and at fairs and carnivals. Easily affordable, made by and for working people, they were part of a vast and profitable pan-european trade. A group of these were known as the bawdy badges, the secular badges, the sexual badges, or the erotic pins.

There are persistent images of locomotion, and motility, farcical assemblages, dissolutions and transformations of gender and class. They delight in hybridity - an extravagant imaginary of social and sexual reproduction, joyfully rendered with absurdist, deflationary humour. It is a world of absurd and inventive beings, rich with humour, dissent, subversion, delight, hilarity, titillation, surprise.

Recent theories have sought to attribute ‘personality’ to the dominance of dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and oestrogen in the brain, and designate subjects as ‘temperament’ types - reminiscent of the mediaeval theory of the four humours. Such projections coincide with new technologies of high definition electron micrography that can now image hormones and neurotransmitter crystals with extraordinary detail – their polarising filters bathing their structures with polychromatic spectral hues. The badges are found always tarnished and monochrome, but would originally have been shiny, enamelled, augmented with coloured glass. Jackson has redrawn and reimagined the figures as an assembly, reinstating their spectral effect with ink and pigment: a sparkling of yellows, pinks and greens underlaid with flashes of gold and umber, creating a spectrum of a-subjective and affect-laden opportunity.

Using the badges as a kind of collective commons from which to add in the present, new narratives of dissent and empowerment around sexual and reproductive bodies are revealed. The work opens up an important lineage of visual methods and vocabularies of resistance and ways of imagining alternative power structures for self determination, as well as challenging ways images may be used to uphold violences of control and exclusion.

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Guide Prices

Ticket TypeTicket Tariff
AdmissionFree

Note: Prices are a guide only and may change on a daily basis.

Facilities

Accessibility

  • All Areas Accessible to Disabled Visitors
  • Facilities for Hearing Impaired Visitors
  • Facilities for Visually Impaired Visitors
  • Facility for service dogs
  • Guide Dogs Permitted
  • Parking Areas for Disabled Visitors - 2 disabled parking bays only.
  • Ramp/Level Access
  • Toilets for Disabled Visitors

Catering

  • On-Site cafe/restaurant - Serving a seasonal menu which reflects the talents of local producers, with delicious cakes and daily specials. Maximum capacity 36.

Establishment Features

  • Conference facilities - Corporate hire of entire building or meeting room only.
  • Event Venue
  • Staff fluent in foreign languages ** (List of languages are separately given)
  • Toilets

Languages spoken

  • French spoken

Payment Methods

  • Maestro Accepted
  • MasterCard accepted
  • Solo accepted
  • Visa accepted

Tours and Demonstrations

  • Educational Visits Accepted
  • Guided Tours Available for Groups

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Map & Directions

Aspex

Type:Gallery

Aspex Portsmouth, The Vulcan Building, Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO1 3BF
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Tel+44 023 9277 8080

Opening Times

Aspex (1 Jan 2024 - 31 Dec 2024)
DayTimes
Monday - TuesdayClosed
Wednesday - Sunday11:00 - 16:00

* Aspex will be open until 8pm on the third Thursday of every month.

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Meeting at Aspex GalleryAspex, PortsmouthAspex is Portsmouth's leading contemporary art gallery, housed within the historic Vulcan Building at Gunwharf Quays.

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