James Little
DRINK BLEACH
31 October – 16 November 2025

Works
Installation views
Press release 

Nasha presents DRINK BLEACH, James Little’s debut solo exhibition with Nasha Gallery.

DRINK BLEACH is a suite of new works comprising three embedded sculptures, six framed pictures, five wall-mounted steel sculptures and a single large wall print.

The installation beckons you toward a fragmented narrative that traces the symptoms of moral fantasies within masculinity. The work considers what fulfills a narrative of fact, and what fulfills a narrative of fantasy, and how each affects masculinity’s self-interpretation of what it is to be masculine.

This oscillation between fact and fantasy in storytelling is discussed in an episode of the 1983 television series Voices, featuring a conversation between writers John Berger and Susan Sontag. They reflect on the relationship between storyteller and listener, and the points at which their perspectives of fact and fantasy intersect - the ambiguity of storytelling. Berger argues that storytellers often begin with an intention to be factual or authentic, but as the story unfolds, they inevitably “begin to invent”, unconsciously adding details or embellishments that shift the account from the factual toward the imaginative. Berger speculates that perhaps the remembered story becomes more compelling, or more coherent, than the moment as it truly happened.

Sontag counters by emphasizing the listener’s responsibility, to make an interpretive choice about the story and its context, to decide whether it is fact or fantasy, and to recognise what it reveals about one’s own perspective on the world, however fantastical it may seem.

Together, Berger and Sontag suggest that the storyteller’s and listener’s perceptions of fact and fantasy rarely have an ingrained misalignment: the storyteller’s inevitable invention and the listener’s susceptibility to it. What emerges is a shared narrative suspended between the two, a simulacrum of authenticity.

The oscillation between fact and fantasy that Berger and Sontag describe can be mapped onto contemporary constructions of masculinity, particularly as mediated through the internet and its historical echoes. Here, masculinity performs the roles of both storyteller and listener simultaneously, the two positions Berger and Sontag treat as distinct have collapsed into one. In its pursuit of authenticity, masculinity has entered a feedback loop of self-mythologising, where the continual retelling and embellishment of its own narrative renders fact and fantasy almost indistinguishable. The stories men tell about themselves, and those absorbed from culture, intertwine into a single mythic fabric: at once grounded in reality and deeply fantastical. What emerges is an inversion of Berger and Sontag’s discussion, here, the listener has become the storyteller, and fantasy has been so thoroughly internalised and reiterated that it is lived as fact. In the search for an authentic identity, masculinity enacts a kind of denied fantasy, mistaking the performance of myth for the truth of the self. In this sense, the contemporary performance of masculinity becomes an ongoing attempt to authenticate itself through the very fictions it seeks to disavow.