NEVEN presents You're only happy when you can see something die!*, a group exhibition curated by artist Leo Costelloe, featuring works by Greer Lankton, Ki Yoong, J C. McCormack, Oliver Elphick and Tiina.

In J C. McCormack’s sculptural installation, a vase of plastic-shrouded silk tulips and peonies sits encased before vertically hung Venetian blinds. The piece draws from a windowsill that the artist spotted on a walk in East London, curiously decorated with artificial flowers wrapped in plastic, a domestic display at once intimate and inaccessible, considered yet not fully avowed. Incorporating 1950s GDR silk flowers and a 1960s Lauscha glass vase, McCormack’s installation draws on remnants of decorative life shaped under conditions of political oppression and scarcity. Sealed against time or damage, the floral display is, by that same gesture, rendered inert and dormant. The work’s theatrical staging, evidenced by the silk flowers, visible stage lights, and fake dust, foregrounds notions of artifice, pointing to the instability between exterior appearance and interior reality.

This kind of simulacral uncanny between the animate and the artificial is arguably no better exemplified than by the doll. Greer Lankton was a pioneering American artist whose practice centred on handmade fabric, wire and papier-mâché dolls, which she animated and photographed in witty, glamorous, and at times grotesque tableaus. The work drew directly from her own life, navigating her transfeminine identity, and frequently depicted both fictive and real characters from her East Village social orbit in the 1980s. Cookie Puss, Ellen and Elvira in Valentine’s Day (1984) emerge from Lankton’s imagination, while Candy in Candy and Mark (1985) imagines Warhol superstar Candy Darling, who had passed away a decade prior, creating a layered form of mediation in which an already mythologised life is further staged, preserved, and transformed. Lankton plays with her characters both as subjects and as afterimages, foregrounding the performance, staging and identity construction inherent to playing with dolls.

Cult and dissemination are key to understanding Finnish doll customiser Tiina Vanhatupa’s Blythe dolls, which operate within a culture and economy of fetishised collectibility and commodity-driven desire. Blythe dolls, originally produced in the early 1970s and later revived in Japan, have developed a fervent global following, particularly within a niche culture of customisation, where artists transform mass-produced dolls into unique, highly individualised figures through carving, hand-painting, and re-rooting hair. Rarity, craftsmanship and distinct aesthetic signatures drive intense demand, with certain makers achieving near-mythic status. Tiina is widely regarded as a leading figure in this field; her works are highly sought after for their precision, creativity, and ability to elevate the doll from a collectable object to a singular art piece.

Also addressing desire and circulation, Ki Yoong’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe distils one of the most recognisable images of twentieth-century beauty into an object of extreme concentration. At a miniature scale yet instantly recognisable, the work foregrounds the ways in which Monroe’s image has been endlessly reproduced, compressed, and consumed. Yoong paints from a 1960 photograph of Monroe, taken by Eve Arnold on the set of The Misfits (1961, dir. John Huston) in Reno, Nevada. Monroe’s character in the film, Roslyn Taber, would be her last fully realised performance. The role was written for Monroe by her then-husband, Arthur Miller, and is often regarded as closest to her off-screen self and, by extension, her most psychologically revealing. What we encounter is not simply Roslyn Taber, but Monroe performing Monroe, performing Roslyn Taber. This adds a further layer of complexity, as Monroe performs a persona shaped by her own, collapsing distinctions between actress and character. The work draws attention to this recursive construction, in which identity is staged, replayed, and ultimately petrified through its own repetition.

Like the legacies of Greer Lankton’s subjects, Monroe’s image became sealed and mythologised through untimely tragedy, preserved against time while fixed in a state of perpetual projection, not unlike McCormack’s taffeta tulips encased in plastic. Oliver Elphick’s drawing of beauty queens dancing in a burning mine similarly collapses glamour into spectacular catastrophe, the line of bodies caught mid-performance within a moment of impending destruction. Developed through research into Svalbard, the remote Arctic archipelago shaped by histories of mining, extraction and climate anxiety, Elphick’s work imagines a Doomsday beauty pageant in a flaming Longyearbyen coal mine, its contestants suspended between pre-apocalyptic performance and impending extinction.

Across the exhibition, images are held in states of suspension: sealed, staged, petrified or preserved against disappearance, yet rendered inert through the same gesture. What emerges is a distinctly phantasmatic space, populated by uncanny likenesses, afterimages, and projected forms, mimicking life, yet invariably not animated by it.

*Line spoken by Marilyn Monroe’s character, Roslyn Taber, to Clark Gable’s character, Gay Langland, in the 1961 film The Misfits.