No Plaice Like Home
No Plaice Like Home 2025
Solo exhibition at COLAB Tower, London; Part of Side/Step Festival
Curation: Dominika Uçar
Exhibition Photography: Jonathan Parnas
“With his first UK solo presentation, Boaz Parnas offers an exhibition that feels at once playful and barbed, weaving personal memory with sharp cultural observation. No Plaice Like Home takes on the question of belonging, not as something secure or sentimental, but as a shifting state, full of contradictions.
Parnas’s sculptures and assemblages thrive on incongruity. A chair emblazoned with the English flag becomes neither patriotic emblem nor discarded rubbish but an uneasy hybrid of both. It hovers between joke and provocation, confronting viewers with how symbols can lose their authority when stripped of context and reimagined as awkward artefacts.
Elsewhere, animal forms appear softened, even made absurd. A fish, usually the image of prey, is depicted unclear, camouflaged and menacing. A bear, rendered in loose and bulbous form, becomes needy rather than fearsome. By subverting the natural order, Parnas suggests that strength and weakness are never stable categories; they are contingent, exchangeable, bound up with play and perception.
What makes the exhibition compelling is its refusal to settle into one mood. Comedy coexists with unease, tenderness with critique. Rather than offering resolution, Parnas stages a precarious balancing act, where humour becomes a strategy for confronting displacement, and irreverence becomes a form of survival.”
- L.Sartain, Director, Rafiki Gallery
Parnas’s sculptures and assemblages thrive on incongruity. A chair emblazoned with the English flag becomes neither patriotic emblem nor discarded rubbish but an uneasy hybrid of both. It hovers between joke and provocation, confronting viewers with how symbols can lose their authority when stripped of context and reimagined as awkward artefacts.
Elsewhere, animal forms appear softened, even made absurd. A fish, usually the image of prey, is depicted unclear, camouflaged and menacing. A bear, rendered in loose and bulbous form, becomes needy rather than fearsome. By subverting the natural order, Parnas suggests that strength and weakness are never stable categories; they are contingent, exchangeable, bound up with play and perception.
What makes the exhibition compelling is its refusal to settle into one mood. Comedy coexists with unease, tenderness with critique. Rather than offering resolution, Parnas stages a precarious balancing act, where humour becomes a strategy for confronting displacement, and irreverence becomes a form of survival.”