The Perimeter

Walking through the high-ceilinged halls of The Perimeter in Bloomsbury, where natural light spills across bare walls and polished floors, you might not expect to stumble across something so disturbing and intimate. Gaaaaaaasp is London-born artist Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo institutional exhibition, turning the gallery’s four floors into a disorienting world of 1960s patterns and clinical sterility, brought together under themes of domestic and gendered labour. In the first room, the ceiling drops oppressively low beneath the flicker of harsh office lights. The walls are covered in 1970s vintage wallpaper; a dull, yellowed floral that seems steeped in years of cigarette smoke. The carpet is a muted, corporate grey-blue and chairs line the edges of the room. A muffled dialogue loops continuously from a TV screen mounted high in the corner, playing recordings from the artist’s own visits to abortion clinics and therapy sessions over the years. The space recalls a clinical waiting area, but it also suggests something more metaphysical: a kind of purgatory, where time is suspended, judgment is quietly present and trauma lingers. In Gaaaaaaasp, the domestic is destabilised. On the top floor, an open trunk has enormous needles piercing its lining like weapons. Another room is configured as a hospital unit, with two 1960s nightstands with bed springs erupting from vintage trunks lit by collapsing surgical lights. The floor is covered in faded pink linoleum, the colour of a...