Reviewed by Sharon Mangion
Reviewed by Sharon Mangion
The Cloud Series, Dawn Shorten, Seven Seven Contemporary Art - 4th-28th October 2007
In today's cynical world it is difficult to appreciate let alone represent a sense of the sublime in nature without it collapsing into sentimental pastiche or parody. Our wonder at nature’s power is not necessarily tempered in the postmodern age but may have been replaced by growing anxieties about the industrial world’s affect on the environment and it is perhaps not surprising that we expect some kind of backlash from the natural elements to overwhelm us at some point.
This of course is what constitutes the concept of the sublime. Not our worries about our affect on nature but an idea that somehow contains its uncontainable power. A word that frames an experience and feeling that is beyond words or concepts. This is the central paradox that came to my mind when viewing Dawn Shorten’s show The Cloud Series currently on at Seven Seven Contemporary Art. How does a formal system whether words or art come to both represent and be so divorced from its subject?
Her neat little cloud paintings referencing old master paintings from Constable to Ruisdael floating white gouache on translucent drafting film are delicate portrayals of disordered evaporative systems. Lifting from the Romantic tradition’s preoccupation with dramatic landscapes they have been isolated and reduced in scale to great effect. Produced in series with no colour to enhance the viewers emotional response they simply show a representational system at work.
Similarly, the conic projections involve systems such as, maps, mirrors and projective geometry to highlight I think the reflective tendency again so central to the Romantic tradition’s take on what would have been in the eighteenth century man’s position in relation to the natural world. There is a wonderful topographical effect as the projections rise up and fold back into conic mountains that threaten to collapse in on themselves. A great metaphor for how our aggressive actions can rise up and come back to haunt us.
Reminding the viewer of how our representational systems frame our view of the world in formal terms may seem academic at times but this is a very postmodern concern: how to represent the unrepresentable without idealising it. But these little paintings and projections are not reflecting an abstract concept of the sublime, they are acknowledging the language of the work as having power to take on big concerns with a formal consistency that presents the sublime in manageable bite size pieces to great homeopathic effect.
A great little show that is not preaching to the converted or the uncoverted for that matter, just a subtle exploration of scale in the grand scheme of things.
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Reviewed by Sharon Mangion
Untold - The Sassoon Gallery, 21 Apr — 4 May 2007
Untold stories of the discarded, the overlooked and the hidden where interior worlds meet the body, the playground, the urban streets and the gallery space itself, are brought together in a show by four artists, So-Ha Au, Catherine Hughes, Andrew Humber and Kelly Ratchford at The Sassoon Gallery, a tucked away space in Peckham.
So-Ha Au's dressmaking patterns are delicately deconstructed schemas charting the skin's spatial matrix as boundary between appearance and invisibility. Her paintings present a disturbing twist as their fragility rubs against the absent fragmented body. Map like they could be ariel views of harbour jettys, their ambiguity heightening the distance between tangible and lyrical landscapes.
Bringing the theme of absent bodies to life Andrew Humber's sculpture is a compelling mechanical doll like contraption that plays with the exchange between physical objects, representational space and the viewer's perceptual field. Drawing the viewer into a participatory world where encounters with the environment are sensed, logged and displayed in a reactive loop Andrew cleverly brings together science, engineering and art revealing the divisional possibilities in sculpture. As Marina Warner has noted in Phantasmagoria it is interesting that such encounters with automata while being real and direct serve to remind the viewer of their own invisible interior world, like looking in a mirror without a reflection....creepy.
Catherine Hughes's paintings also take a second look at an elided world but this time it is at the discarded objects that litter our urban environment. Critiquing ideas of value and the once privileged status of painting in the hierarchical world of art, particularly history painting, one wonders at the history of these objects and whether precious moments like social get-togethers and childhood milestones have really been forgotten.
Kelly Ratchford's drawings also allude to an undercurrent that is not only present in the media, well perhaps more blatantly in the media, but also in the collective unconscious if one believes in such things. It also reminded me how art can negotiate tricky and uncomfortable subjects with humour and irony. Collapsing the space between childhood drawing and a sinister fascination with corruption these little drawings have a powerful punch.
A thoughtfully curated show by So-Ha Au Untold has brought together a body of work that has a lot to say about the understated boundaries that frame our experience of the everyday shown here as fragmented exchanges between painting, drawing and sculpture.
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Thy Neighbours’ Ox 2, Space Station Sixty-Five - 3 December – 27 January 2006
While the earlier show ‘Thy Neighbours’ Ox’ in 2003 took a ‘shared right’ stance to the ownership of art objects, ‘Thy Neighbours’ Ox 2’ recently showing at Space Station Sixty-Five wants to celebrate a greedy aesthetic. Using a home-grown folk approach to making, craft and DIY objects are made to counter global mass production values with a sumptuous and gothic concentration on materials.
By collapsing brute and ideal aesthetics that seems to have so preoccupied art in the last century, quite a bit of the work refers to the problem of expressing Romantic ideals in art, the impossibility of living up to them and the ease with which they have been used to set up social hierarchies. Cathie Pilkington’s Jetzt Hab’ Ich Dich! (I’ve Got You Now!), for example, is a chilling tableau of a traditional Nordic troll-like toy, in this case a hedgehog hunter, proudly displaying its ermine catch, inverting the classical primitive hierarchy that continues to dog art. Emma Talbot’s Pillow Book floats images of pretty girls and boys across a screen that have a Mills & Boon take on the Romantic while Paul Jones’ wonderful Popcornaut, looking, searching... envelopes has craggy landscape doodles on the back of envelopes, including one from the Inland Revenue Contributions Office.
Edwina Ashton also does a wonderfully comic turn on nature and the Romantic in her films, Beetle and Beautiful Pot. The latter has a giant caterpillar negotiating the roundness of a flowerpot with raw sausage meat which I defy anyone not to have a giggle at. The theme of the raw and the cooked is continued in Gayle Chong Kwan’s photographs, Cockaigne prints that have iconic emblems like Babel’s tower rendered in uncooked pasta and other more gory food stuffs, while bourgeois values are reassessed and found to be just as fetid in Paul Jones’ tumour-ridden Sideboard and outmoded in Shane Waltener’s Web doilies.
The mood of the show is not reflective though. Susan Collis’s How to tell the difference between the Living and the Dead with the statement ‘Drop Blind Angel’ displayed in party decorations might be a relinquishing of such ‘high’ ideals and aspirations but it is done with revelry in mind, not wistful contemplation. Starting with the assumption that art has something to be coveted begs the question whether it can ever be a democratic medium. Stephen Nelson’s Fungu should have been allowed to strut its stuff on centre stage to make this point but interestingly was tucked discretely beside a TV monitor. Sarah Jones’ Hoopla-gate was the most intriguing piece for me though, commenting more abstractly I think, on how easily we can be deceived by the powers that be.
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Reviewed by Sharon Mangion
BOOM - One Small Step, 19 Oct — 17 Dec 2005
It is good to see students at rival art institutions collaborating and exhibiting together. Joseph Richards an RCA graduate and Jonty Lees from the Slade both take a playful look at the possibilities in drawing through other media, such as, paint, plasticine, film, blue tac, enamel, chalk to name just a few of the materials used. Their joint show BOOM at One Small Step in Clerkenwell negotiates a contemporary art space that doubles as a music and commercials production company and in a visual conversation between the two artists that plays against the gallery’s combined interests they explore the rhythm of drawing and imagery. For example, our taken for granted view that experience is continuous is disrupted in Joseph Richard’s film, Rise to Set. This humorous and technically aware film uses editing to great effect and works by bringing the artificiality of the image to our attention yet still left me guessing as to whether he really sat on the same spot for a whole day. Jonty Lees films also play with the idea of perpetual motion and use clever, simple devices in Windmill and TT Matic to create wonderful drawing machines. His ping pong machine adapted out of a leaf-blower for example, shows a systematic and self-referential tendency still at work in contemporary art practice and seems to point the finger more specifically at painting.
The rhythm of drawing changes dramatically in Joseph Richard’s painstakingly detailed pencil drawings, which show an obsessiveness that is exploded in the content of Bolder and a doodling in his smaller drawings with a comic quality that puts one in mind of Philip Guston but without the emotional punch of Gaston’s imagery. The tackiness of blue-tac in his Awoken by the Light, has hints of the grotesque, but this show to my mind is more about the discrete nature of drawing and more broadly, representation, rather than any broken down line between abstraction and figuration. Joseph Richard’s imagery verges on the fractal and surreal. His simple language of dots, repetition and doodles make delicate and quirky patterns and objects that reflect not only a movement between micro and macro worlds where things emerge and disappear with their own rhythm, but also allows the irrational to poke through the sensible world of reason.
Although the conversation between the two artists may at first appear to be one sided through sheer volume of work, in the end this sort of collaboration proves complimentary in strategic terms. With each artist cueing the other at different intervals they do achieve a certain tempo. Jonty Lee’s Ping-pong appears to be emblematic of an out-moded individualistic practice in contemporary art while Joseph Richards seems to want to retain a certain amount of expressiveness in his.
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Reviewed by Sharon Mangion
Informal, Hayes Lane Market, 6 — 11 Nov 2005
There is always a slight air of anxiety about the people who come to Hayes Lane Market, as if they are not quite sure what is going on or what they should do there. Either embarrassed at watching painters at work, or not quite sure if they ought to be there or not – is it a market, a studio or exhibition space: the territory is not marked out clearly for them.
The InFormal show by Goldsmiths' postgraduate textile students similarly, looks at textiles through a disparate range of media, including photography, installation, video and sculpture that makes orientating oneself around the space a challenge, although perhaps not as much as usual, since being under the umbrella term of 'art' can be comforting.
Having said that, division has always posed an ontological problem for art: there is no real consensus as to what separates the art object from everyday objects or what art really is even though a lot of people seem happy to do and accept an awful lot of stuff in its name.
In this case Textiles is used as a conceptual reference point and takes an interesting turn on the Modernist concerns with thinking through materials. Textiles has always to my mind had a comfortable relationship with its materiality that other media, like painting, photography and film all strive for. However, the sensuousness and directness of touch associated with its making has tended to reinforce the medium in terms of cosy traditions of the domestic interior and craft. So by linking other media to the idea of textiles instead of concentrating on its material quality this exhibition reveals textiles’ divisible nature. Emi Arai’s screen for example, while seeming to have a nostalgic relationship to Japanese screen embroidery, weaves thread, plastics and photography together bringing old traditions of craft and newer production techniques in line with each other. Jolan Bogdan, takes a sympathetic look at the alienating conditions of mass media culture: the hoody lad wants to become something and belong but is left slumped in armchairs and heaps of apathy. Tristan JS Scutt’s Trappy-Tris health plan also comments on the digestibility of media images and how they can shape identity in a disturbingly humorous array of portrait photographs and dietary paraphernalia. Other works that reveal textiles’ versatility include Fumi Kato’s Video which takes on the broader relationship between the fragile naked body and catastrophic environmental events while Dr Polly Fibre's performance shows some interconnections and a circularity in making by manipulating sewing machines to create rhythms, shadows and fabric documents.
Installation also plays an important role in the examination of how the body interacts with interior spaces in Eleanor Lawlor’s work and while it may have proved a struggle to try and see the connection to textiles in this case I couldn’t help feel in the end that her ‘Interior games’ could also have made a good title for the show.
Copyright Sharon Mangion 2006 All Rights Reserved
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