I’m familiar with CBS Gallery, usually visiting in the glow of the evening for sound art and experimental music performances. So, it was refreshing to enter the venue – consisting of a foyer, studios and a gallery – in daylight for their first exhibition of 2025, Monster Truck. CBS is situated within a former warehouse in the Baltic Triangle area of Liverpool and provides affordable space for artists where they can explore and present ideas to a public audience. Liverpool artist and CBS resident, King of Freedom World Champion (aka Jude Porter Chambers), greeted me at the door and I was soon introduced to Jerusalem born artist, Boaz Parnas, with whom he collaborated on this exhibition. Each time I come in here, the unit has morphed and shifted, adaptable with hidden nooks revealing themselves to a new configuration. Outside of the curation of the gallery itself, I notice that residents’ ideas spill out, plastered on studio walls and across surfaces, offering themselves as an informal display of creative iterations and as a complimentary addition to programmed shows.
Inside the gallery, there were a number of wall mounted pieces (seven in total, consisting of paintings and sculpture) and a floor based piece. They felt harmonious – it was hard at first to differentiate between which artist had made which work. Both aesthetically and thematically there was an unravelling of dialogue between the two artists’ work, which invited the audience to consider the ‘satirical aspect of art making and masculinity.’ For me, this is the most fun part about experiencing art – being confronted with the initial sensation and unpacking what affiliations and references have led to those responses.
The first piece I encounter is Parnas’ ‘Barbabaeu Colossus’ (2025), which references a French TV character known for his sensitivity amidst torment. Here, represented with large eyes, scribbled on stuffed FIBC bags, Barbabaeu’s wide stare greeted you on entry and dominated the space like a nervous energy cursed to be perceived. The textures and materiality reminded me of a bouncy castle. Next to Barbabaeu, a series of works by King of Freedom World Champion were displayed along the wall on small wooden shelves: sculptures of heads moulded from plaster and rough wood carvings of imagined forms, one of which was painted bronze. Time spent with these pieces revealed marks which were not immediately noticeable. These markings – recorded in ink, thumb and finger – gave shape to the faces and characters in a way that felt almost ‘crass’, but without the negative connotations associated with this term. On the adjacent wall to the heads-on-shelves, were mixed media paintings by Parnas, ‘Carpenter Bee I’ and ‘Carpenter Bee II’ (2025), placed like mirrors of opposition. One was bright, colourful and happy with a thumbs up, while the other presented a thumbs down, barely identifiable through the black painting. This polarisation complimented the discomfort of the plaster heads, while nodding to the distinct cartoonish elements of his Barbabeau piece.
The visual language of the exhibition was one of bold confidence interlaced with naivety, and its lexicon bounced about the room in playful conversation. Its mischievous tone, rich with cultural references, belied the uncomfortable feeling of ‘being at odds with the world’. With time, this feeling revealed itself and I began to view the exhibition as a tangible materialisation of what is left behind when figuring out one’s own identity and where this sits within the narrow spectrum of gendered identities provided to us by societal norms. Both artists’ detournement of scrap material evoked notions of reinvention of self through outward expression, which seemed to call into question traditional representations of masculinity and how one can express masculinity. My immediate thought was that this all felt like childhood / boyhood. Remember: childlike scribbles and attempts at creating masks and identities, giving shape and name to novel forms, personifying found objects, and cartoons evoking emotion? That time was fragile and unscripted. I was reminded of how it felt to be the little girl who wanted to play with the boys, and the hyper-masculinity that came with that. Identity becomes an attempt at embodiment of characters. Memories brought forth by the exhibition’s forum of playful vulnerability felt delicate and sweet.
I was pondering the exhibition title and where it had come from (it seemed to reference King of Freedom World Champion’s previous performance at CBS where he playfully drove a remote control monster truck using a built instrument into the audience’s ankles) when I turned around and like a revelation spotted ‘Monster Truck Jesus’ (2025) looking down on me from above the gallery space entrance. ‘Monster Truck Jesus’ was a sculpted head mounted on a scrappy painting that looked as if it would have otherwise been for the trash. It felt like a satirical idolisation of the hyper masculine symbol of the monster truck, and made me realise that perhaps this was the intent behind the World Champion’s self proclaimed name (satirical hypermasculinity).
A couple of days after the opening of the exhibition, we gathered as an audience in the dimly lit foyer of CBS for the latest installment of Evening Music, a regular donation-entry experimental sound art and music event hosted by CBS studio resident, JC Leisure (aka Jake Goouge). The exhibition was illuminated in the gallery and the glow of this room tipped out over cosy makeshift seating and a spread of bread and blind scouse. We watched a performance by Zurkas Tepla (aka Sasha Kletsov) which traversed a landscape of jazz, noise and comical performance elements, followed by an experimental performance by saxophonist Signe Emmeluth. The use of aliases by artists and organisers in this context mirrors the exhibition’s sense of embodiment of characters and identities. Through Evening Music JC Leisure fosters an environment and community whereby sound artists have the comfort and freedom to challenge and explore how sound can be presented in a live setting. There is a clear vulnerability that is present in such an event, not only because the act of performing for an audience is in itself vulnerable, but because it becomes less about catering to commerciality and more about authentic playfulness. This made it very fitting as an accompaniment to ‘Monster Truck’ as it complimented the themes King of World Freedom Champion and Boaz Parnas explored.
Exhibitions such as Monster Truck and the accompanying Evening Music in CBS serve as an example of significance and importance of artist-led spaces. It is through these kinds of DIY efforts that independent art in Liverpool is afforded places to play, experiment, fail and succeed in community.
Monster Truck ran from 17-19th February, and Evening Music took place on 19th February 2025 at CBS Gallery, Liverpool.
Mia Stoces-Brown is a writer and sound artist based in Liverpool.
This review was an independent commission from Corridor 8.
Published 23.03.2025 by Natalie Hughes
1,178 words