Notes from the Exhibition
Copy Cat Kill the Rat
I walked into the exhibition with curiosity and walked out with a heaviness I didn’t expect.
Copy Cat Kill the Rat doesn’t shout at you but it watches you. And maybe that is what makes it uncomfortable. The works sit there with an almost deliberate indifference, as if daring the viewer to decide what they are looking at: imitation, rebellion, provocation, or emptiness dressed as intent.
There is a recurring feeling of repetition throughout the exhibition. Not repetition as discipline, but repetition as echo. Gestures that feel borrowed. Ideas that feel familiar, though their origins remain deliberately obscured. It raises a quiet but persistent question at what point does influence stop being dialogue and start becoming disguise?
What struck me most was how much the exhibition leaned on explanation. Long titles. Heavy concepts. A reliance on language to justify form. It made me wonder why we’ve reached a moment in art where meaning often arrives after the work, as if the artwork itself is no longer trusted to hold its own weight.
There is, of course, discomfort here but not all discomfort is the same. There is the discomfort that challenges, and then there is the discomfort that confuses intention with depth. The exhibition seems to sit in that uneasy space between the two. It asks to be taken seriously, but often feels more performative than vulnerable.
And yet, I don’t think the exhibition fails entirely. It succeeds in revealing something perhaps not about originality, but about our current art climate. A climate where shock is currency, where being strange is often mistaken for being brave, and where the act of copying can be reframed as critique if wrapped in the right vocabulary.
Walking through the space, I kept thinking about craft. About time. About the quiet labour that rarely makes headlines. There is something unsettling about how easily skill can be dismissed when concept takes the spotlight—and how quickly the absence of effort can be defended as intention.
Copy Cat Kill the Rat feels less like an answer and more like a symptom. A mirror held up to an art world increasingly unsure of what it wants to protect process or provocation, sincerity or spectacle.
I left the exhibition not with clarity, but with a lingering question:
When everything can be art, what do we choose to stand by?
And perhaps that uncertainty is the most honest thing the exhibition offers.