Artist: James Cabaniuk

Workplace presents James Cabaniuk’s first solo exhibition with the gallery I Don’t Know What’s Come Over Me.

The exhibition features a new series of paintings that reflect the nuanced, complex, and often paradoxical experiences of queer identity, intimacy, and the subversive joy that comes with embracing personal and communal chaos.

Cabaniuk’s new body of work is a deep investigation into queer communications hidden in plain sight messaging. Drawing from a history of veiled signalling, from violets to the hanky code, Cabaniuk’s work reflects a unique way of communicating through metaphor, gesture, and abstraction.

The title of the exhibition, I Don’t Know What’s Come Over Me, resonates with this duality, speaking both to the sudden surge of emotion that can overwhelm, as well as the cultural pressure to suppress or judge these responses as ‘unbecoming’. Through a carefully orchestrated visual language, Cabaniuk interrogates how the queer body, often caught in tumultuous spirals of identity and expression, has been forced to reconcile with societal expectations. Their paintings confront the messy beauty of being overwhelmed, by desire, loss, and joy, and the liberating chaos that allows one to emerge stronger and more self-aware.

The works presented are both deeply personal responses as well as part of a larger commentary on queer temporalities and the absence of these histories in traditional spaces of culture. The paintings offer a topographical view of Cabaniuk’s experience, simultaneously micro and macro in scope, where the details of personal anecdotes blur into the larger, shared narrative of queer communities.

With thick gestural surfaces that often employ glitter, confetti and soil, the works speak to the queer opacity of experience, where meaning is buried in the layers of colour, shape, and form. The paintings exist in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration, a zone where meaning is not fixed, but constantly shifting and evolving. The works are a celebration of the resilience that comes from chaos, and the moments of kinship that form between individuals in unexpected spaces.

James Cabaniuk (b. 1987, Carlisle, UK) lives and works between Manchester and London. They received their Bachelors of Arts from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2015 and graduated with Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University of London in 2023. Primarily working with large format painting, their practice uses personal and canonical histories to explore queer temporality and opacity. They started and ran horseshed, a queer archive and exhibition space in a rural shed and held online. They were commissioned by Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners to commemorate their 30th anniversary. Their ongoing curatorial project Archeology has been hosted at various locations with artists Jamie Bradley. During their MFA they transformed the men’s toilets in the studios into the gay bar LIPS, hosting parties and installing a glory hole. Recent exhibitions include In Holes and Corners, The Italian Garden, Devon, UK (2024), and still I may, Workplace Gallery, London, UK (2024); and in and out of weeks, WORKPLACE, London, UK (2024); There’s a Hole in the Bucket, Slugtown, Newcastle, UK (2023); HERE, IONE & MANN Gallery, London, UK (2023); Des Bains presentation for Minor Attractions/Cornershop, London, UK (2023); UNANNOUNCED the other voices of silence, ARTLAND Milano, Milan (2023); Our Body Are Portal, The Asylum Chapel, London, UK (2022); The Cave You Fear To Enter Holds The Treasure You Seek, Lima Zulu, London, UK (2018); My Past is Not My Present, All Welcome, Vilnius, Lithuania (2016).