Review: Surface Gallery Open 2011
A group show that displays just one or two works of an artist, each of whom is based in a disparate location around the country, could suffer from a potentially incoherent mishmash of ideas. Nevertheless, a number of interesting unifying concepts emerged in the Surface Gallery’s very strong Open Show 2011.
A thoughtfully arranged display, the numerically mapped space was very easy to navigate, with wall based works lining the gallery space and five sculptural pieces occupying the inner area. Video and light works were concealed behind a wall length curtain. The overriding impression was one of understated quality, the works notching a tally of more hits than misses. For an organisation run entirely by volunteers, the success of the show demonstrates a skilled curatorial team with an eye for good art and the capacity to bring together a very professional exhibition; I enjoyed this show more than the concurrent Jean Genet exhibition at the Contemporary, which is itself a kind of group show.
If there are some linking themes, one of the weaker ones could be that a couple of pieces comment on, and flog the dead horse of, the perceived throw-away ethos of current society. The terms 'shitty mass-production' and 'consumerist crap' crop up a couple of times in the explanatory literature. Ting-Tong Chang builds a rainbow shape out of shopping trolleys while Anneliese Krueger makes what appears to be an enlarged fish-and-chips fork.
Krueger talks of the labour intensive work required to make larger than life products and the inherent ironic futility of the end result - an object now too big to serve its original function. Its acknowledged Warholian roots, namely a preoccupation with ethereal meaning constituting the only real something of a non-art object, feels dated. The piece doesn't mean much to me. She could have gone a step further and employed that postmodernist trick of appropriation by recovering items from the sets of The Borrowers or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to meet very much the same end. As for useless objects, I’ll make a call on the lobster telephone and drink from a furry teacup, ta very much. Its title, Folk, had me wondering if there was a typo. In addition, there exists a little known concept called ‘the economies of scale'. Indeed, one-off prototypes, like a big wooden fork, are expensive and time-consuming to manufacture. However, once a design is agreed upon, a factory (in some far-flung province of China) can be tooled up to cheaply churn out thousands of copies within a few standard deviations of perfection. It is fact, and there can't be much more left of the idea to address artistically (unless you focus on the troubling human cost arising from the spate of suicides in factories manufacturing Apple gadgets). With the advent of 3D printers this will all change1. Unique and highly personalised consumer products will be only a click away. Where are the artworks dealing with the implications of that?
Ting-Tong's Rainbow makes one of the most impactful and exciting visual statements of the show. Dragging a shopping trolley back to his studio, he was then inspired to liberate more trolleys from the store. Stacking and bashing together the stolen carts the disillusioned artist fashioned this metalwork sculpture. Yet, in my eyes, he missed a trick - the four big supermarkets each seem to have assimilated a colour from the rainbow spectrum; for example, Asda green or Tesco blue. All we have here is Sainsbury's orange, a lone flame-haired fighter in the no man's land of Richard Of York Giving Battle In Vain. This lack of chromatic variety could actually reveal the underlying homogeneity of supermarket companies that spend millions of advertising pounds a year in a desperate bid to differentiate themselves one from the other.
Rainbow is more interesting than Folk because it throws up unexpected questions. A rainbow connotes utopian promises and natural purity, the myths with which we fill our shopping baskets. These disfigured and bent shopping trolleys, as if transported from a post-nuclear disaster area, form an archway. The piece could serve equally well as an entrance to a junkyard, or to a big multi-national hypermarket chain that has cannily commissioned an artist to jazz up the frontage. But which side of this 'rainbow' are we standing on? Have we passed through it yet, or are we positioned underneath it? In fact, are junkyard and supermarket one and the same thing?
I found the paintings a particular strength of this exhibition. Dermott Punnett's painting Collapse depicts an Asian petrol station crashing in on itself down the middle in a V for victory or of dissent. The striking THIS IS NOW - turquoise(VII) by Richard Devereux, a circular patch of blue on blank paper, seemed to conjure the cerebral imprint of the mind of an enlightened monk. Its fibrous ebb and swell stilled neurons. The harmonious blue could represent the colour of our planet observed afar from stellar distances, at once a humbling and empowering notion. The Summit of Carn Aosda by Dundee-based Lyndsey Redford, a large work of a mountain skiing scene, shows a painter with some way to climb but whose output during ascent could well be spectacular. The semi-figurative Van by Daniel Peter was of a van-shaped solid schematically exploding. I liked it.
Hidden behind the black curtain and aptly separated from the majority of its peers was Tim Haynes' Endless Motion. A light wire criss-crosses from peg to peg fastened to the wall, which is reminiscent of the trail lights of vehicles on long exposure photographs. The work was made after Haynes' travels and living for periods abroad, ostensibly informed by having to adapt to cultures and move around in countries in which he would always remain an outsider. This work feels alien and alienating - if it spoke a language, it's one that I’m sure I wouldn’t understand. The eye never rests; on tracing one section of wire to reach a stationary node it immediately follows the next path out. The observer really is placed in a state of endless motion. I returned to THIS IS NOW to recover my bearings.
Of the other pieces behind the curtain, Welcome to Tokyo by Joseph Cutts is a video short that documents the garish flashing neon of Tokyo, fitting into the theme of foreignness. Leo Koivistoinen's Colour Me Blood Red takes the reductionist approach in film-making to a logical extreme: a horror film soundtrack plays while different shades of colour slideshow on screen. When we watch something, horror film or indeed any audiovisual media, Koivistoinen’s piece reminds us that all we are truthfully experiencing is a sequence of flashing colours and sound, the conjunction of which hold the magical power to incite extreme emotional reactions.
Several sculptures on show explored the ideas of form and repetition and, in my reading at least, echo the earlier themes of industry and machine-made products, albeit in a much more subtle and engaging way. James Clarkson artfully suspends polygonal solids and Irene Pérez Hernández displays the outcome of the repeated twisting and deforming of metal bands.
Ordering of Colour and Form by James Clarkson is a mobile with two suspended elements, a circular light tube and a metal wire triangle, while the third tethered object, an earthen block, is rooted to the ground. The primitive 3D shapes - the torus, the triangular prism, and the cuboid - are presented here as semi-idols, the spiritual building blocks of the material world. Its title suggests the piece is intended as a template, a kind creative prototype for future works. Material, shape, and the order of the elements all working together present an intriguing tableau: is this the sculptural abstraction of an aeroplane in flight – that engineering marvel of the modern age? There's something both industrial (note the Wickes lighting and snaking power cables) yet very natural about this artwork; it is a piece of art that looks squarely ahead in the face of the 21st century, an era where the creative is finding ever more ways to harmonise the man-made with the organic, from Bjork’s current multimedia Biophilia project to the writer Christian Bok crafting poetry in DNA2. In fact, Laura Green's baffling sculpture on the other side of the room, Untitled (A Renewed Sense of Purpose), consisting of a tree branch sticking out of a plant pot concrete mass, literally points towards that future.
In Loop Series 1, the metal triangle in Clarkson’s work undergoes a topological alteration, wire flattened to a metal sheet and kinks stretched out to make a fluidly warped loop. In this work, two of these loop forms are displayed on a metal shelving structure, each with a thick line of colour wrapping around their middle on one side. Here Hernández seems to explore how an easily repeatable starting point, the untouched loop with stripe, can, through an intuitive and almost automatic transformative process at the artist’s hand (in plain language, a spot of enjoyable boshing and bashing), lead to unique and exciting sculptures in their own right. Her manipulations charge them with a ‘something’ that is satisfying to observe and reflect upon, whatever their actual meaning, and is the refreshing opposite of the backwards-looking Folk. There’s a touch of comedy, too – it’s as if a misbehaving loop has wriggled from its place on one of the shelves and climbed up the unit to hang off the top of a post. Back home, armed with a looped strip of white paper and an ink-drawn line, I’m still trying to figure out how Hernandez arrived at her deformations.
Jonathan Kipps’ petite work, painted canvas stretched between two black wooden square blocks, exists on the boundary between painting-object and sculpture. It is like one of the most unruly of Angela de la Cruz’s painting-sculptures from last year’s Turner Prize exhibit has served time and been cut down to size, released on parole at the Open Show for good behaviour.
The photography on display suffered from the fact that most prints were taken from a series and, therefore, presented as singular works in this show, conspicuously lacked a narrative context. In Untitled 2, taken from the series Horizon of Expectations, Andrew Carlson appears to be challenging the veracity of the photographic image: the fog in his street scene - the record of a natural phenomenon or an illusory digital effect? The academic Winterless Skies by Alice Myers shows plants whose living processes fog up the glass panel of a greenhouse, perhaps a questioning of humanity’s urge to collect and tame nature. Man Painting, China by Emma Sywji would have made a great entry as part of a complete documentary series but on its own appeared lost and out of place. On the whole, I was left with a very uncertain impression of the photographs I saw.
What is for sure is that the future for all the artists in this Open Show looks bright - a certain shade of supermarket orange, even.
Open Show 2011 was part of the independent arts festival, NOTLOST. On July 15th Ting-Tong Chang was announced the winner of the show. The artist will hold a free solo exhibition at the Surface Gallery in 2012.
Reading List:
1. 3D Printing, The Economist, February 2011
2. The Xenotext Experiment by Christian Bok
