Ciggies & Chat, 2026
The world conjured by Gori Mora and James Rigler is one of nighttime honey. It's a Neverlandish place, where habitual systems collapse; where the language of identity, signs, are cocked anew through the stuff of hearsay, whispers behind the surface of things. Drawn to the thresholds of the mundane, the friction between the ordinary and its extra- counterpart, the work assembled here pushes us to dwell with the double face of desire; a state of lust (risk), a state of longing (hope); the duality at the heart of queer identity.
Signals & Echoes features new works by Mora and Rigler. With each artist aspiring to new expressive ends, the artworks on show gesture towards one another, resonating with difference. Previously, Mora has approached painting counter to the norm. Working verso, on clear perspex, he usually constructs his paintings by completing their foreground first, then applying a background over this, with the final image only becoming visible once he has flipped these plastic scenes around. Formally, Mora prizes the flatness found in this approach, likening the effect to the textuality of phone screen images. Seen in relation to the fragmentary arrangement of his subject matter, often nude male bodies surrounded by queer foliage, this allusion riffs on processes of image construction; specifically, how we, queer bodies or otherwise, create ourselves online, using shallow profile photos and select sign snippets, visual and/or written, to project an ideal assemblage of self. Mora embraces the language of this social self-staging, subverting the figurative icons found in places such as Orange-Facebook (ykify) to toy with notions of desire.
In this exhibition, Mora rejects his on perspex method, pursuing instead the more traditional back-to-frontness of on canvas painting, where a painter paints their scene from back to fore. With this inversion of his usual formalities, Mora aspires to create compositions with added texture; steamy spaces with body. Sitting before this new series, that sentiment is hard to miss. Each painting positions nude males, objects of display that attract the male gaze, within an Art Deco-esque sauna, a place full of fruit and flowers, tube socks and mythical illusions. The way Mora depicts his common subject matter through an approach uncommon to him tinges this work with a semiotic deviancy. Rather than meekly pastiching the screen stage of contemporary life, these artworks point towards the queer manufacture of the self; how queer bodies embrace the multiplicity sequestered in certain signals to risk arousing another's gaze as well as to signal collective intimacy.
Rigler's sculptures echo Mora's formal foray. The plasticky still lifes in this exhibition embody a figurative development in his practice, with the subject matter that writhes with double entendre; a cute pansy becomes a monumental penis, vice versa. The materiality of his chosen medium often guides Rigler's creative process. In this exhibition, he leans into the stuff of clay, its limitations and materiality, clutching it, pushing and pulling it to prompt what his next form could be. Physically giving himself over to a medium in this way allows Rigler to escape from the confines of believability; how he/we are told things mean. By suspending the singularity of a sign's meaning, Rigler's artworks invite us to speculate on the hidden language found behind the face of things, to find new affinities vis-à-vis form.
The series of ceramics featured in Signals & Echoes have emerged out of Rigler's fascination with the term 'Fruit and Flowers'; its appearance in the account books of businessmen and folks of industry who use it as a shorthand to hide monies spent on unearthly delights: drugs, sex, the stuff of a hedonistic lifestyle. Such clerical trickery led Rigler to think about his double life as a queer person and co-parent father, and specifically to the signs common to each. In each of these contexts, a form's meaning becomes about intention, used to drum up carnal feelings as well as to demarcate a space of care. Rigler crafts his cheeky objects out from this porous understanding of thinglyness. As compositions, the still lifes in this exhibition accentuate this sentiment. Arranged paratactically, without the rigidity of connecting frames, these seemingly changeable groupings appear like sentences writ in emojis, with meanings existing as something totally subjective and relationally known.
Wandering through this exhibition, it's hard not to feel like we are within the molasses of bitter-sweet fantasy. The forms are cute and curved, cocking one way while jesting another, corralling meanings in a gossipy way. With each artist embracing the double face of desire, its lust- and long-full icons, their artworks invite us to rethink ubiquitous codifications. Specifically, they ask us to dwell with the porosity of identity, to explore how bodies can appear and appear differently, mean and mean differently, in a world congealed queer.
-Toby Üpson, 2026
