REVIEW: Brian Griffiths, The Invisible Show

Published: ART REVIEW, 15th February 2012

Contrary to the suggestion of its title, the work in Brian Griffiths’s new exhibition at Vilma Gold is far from undetectable to the human eye.

Filling the white-walled space are five large metal-framed cubes, each structure variably titled Small Invisible, Medium Invisible or Large Invisible (all works, 2012), draped in layered, sewn canvas: Frankenstein tents that reach up towards the relatively low ceiling and bulge across the gallery. Overbearing, they constrict and prescribe the visitor’s movement; and at 2m high, they also prevent the average spectator from seeing over them. Their forms create narrow corridors around the room, forcing the viewer to traverse the works up close. The metal frames are orange with rust, while the pieces of canvas are old and worn: mottled with bruiselike spots, sunbleached patches and faint paint specks.

There is something worryingly abject about their appearance. The cloth tones are fleshlike: pale pinks and a yellowish beige, while the heavy, flaccid folds of cloth at times hang like loose skin. Occasionally deep vermillion stitching scars the fabric like deep, raw wounds; roughly mended patches appear like plasters covering a sore.

This tactile, anthropomorphic quality calls to mind a moment in H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), from which the show takes its title: the novel’s protagonist, Griffin, an invisible psychopath, is killed by an angry crowd. Dead, his body once more becomes visible, trampled, wounded and bruised for all to see. In a similar vein, the sculptures’ coarsely woven material evokes the bandages Griffin (Griffiths?) uses to hide his transparency.

Seen in another light, the damp and worn marks upon the canvas surfaces hint at a past of utility at odds with the sterile rooms of the gallery. These tents seem displaced, evocative of refugee camps and abandoned houses. Their presence is sinister. What is it, the viewer is forced to ask, that these large canvas cubes cover? Is it something too horrible for us to see?

Yet these large structures are also potentially exciting and playful, suggesting childhood dens made from sheets and a kitchen table. The smell of the thick canvas is nostalgic of wet camping holidays or intrepid sea journeys, experienced or imagined. The narrow corridors constrict, but also incite curiosity and adventure.

I found myself instinctively kneeling on the floor and peering eagerly between folds to get a glimpse inside. When I succeeded, I found an unexpected warm orange glow, the gallery spotlights penetrating the canvas cube structures. These initially ominous objects in the end offer a place of refuge, each tent a void and surface to be filled with fabrications and illusions.

The sculptures of The Invisible Show differ from what one might expect of Griffiths’s work. They are far more minimal and abstract than Griffiths’s previous work. His gigantic plaster panda head installed on a Gloucester Road Underground platform in London as part of the 2007 Life Is a Laugh installation, for example, or his early cardboard control-room installations, reminiscent of the slipshod aesthetic of the old Thunder Birds sets, or Beneath the Stride of Giants (2004), Griffiths’s large ship-like sculpture composed of bits of junk furniture.

Yet the underlying thread of play juxtaposed with trepidation present in all the above remains. These seemingly plain, slightly grotesque tents open up and take the visitor to a world of endless imaginative possibility, both of horror and delight.

LINK: http://www.artreview.com/forum/topics/brian-griffiths-the-invisible-show-vilma-gold 

Brian Griffiths: The Invisible Show is at Vilma Gold, London to 19 February

REVIEW: Julia Oschatz – Below is Flat Up There

Palagkas.Temporary’s most recent exhibition space is the Old Pimlico Library. A building filled with disregarded shelves, books long gone, tables upturned and still speckled with pastel mounds of chewing gum; glass panels giving view to laminated office desks no longer occupied. 

German artist Julia Oschatz, who created an entirely new body of work for this exhibition, was not presented with the plain canvas of white walls and clear floors, synonymous with the modern gallery. But rather a space saturated with remnants of its past. This teaming, however, has resulted in a wonderfully integrated show, where location and art enter into delicate dialogue.

Oschatz has created work sensitive and empathetic to its situation. Large cardboard structures reach in precarious shapes up into the ceiling, and curve to form hallowed caves in the children’s reading area, where tiny red plastic chairs still populate. Constructed roughly, silver tape and staples left visible, the physical weakness of each momentous object is made apparent.  As a result, so too is the vulnerable fate of the rooms they occupy. 

Embedded within these installations and scattered lopsided on the floor are old TV sets displaying videos of Oschatz’s performance art. Across each convex screen moves an odd creature dressed in loose plane grey clothing, with large clumpy blocks for feet and various bulbous, featureless heads: some spherical, some tubular, others loosely resembling a rabbit. 

In most, this mute, mysterious animal enacts fruitless actions: scrubbing the floor aggressively with a broom covered in black ink, frantically tying knots in a long rope, spilling ping pong balls over the floor. Predominantly playful in tone, there is also a disarmingly sinister undercurrent. In these moving images the viewer witnesses both mania and the creation of chaos to no clear purpose. The futility articulated highlights the fruitlessness of these previously long unused rooms.

While the re-presentation of performance art in film format can often dampen the mediums effect, (as many art theorists have argued, a large part of performance art’s power lies in the physical presence of artist and audience together in a particular temporal moment), here it only adds.

The TV screens enforce a barrier between audience and creature, rendering the viewer utterly helpless to the bizarre, destructive actions of Oschatz’s fantastical protagonist: a sensation particularly poignant considering the many library closures across the UK this year, despite frequent and substantial protests. 

Yet through these videos, Oschatz also offers a glimmer of hope. Each screen presents a documentation of her live art, thus making this somewhat dilapidated space fulfill its original purpose. Through the work shown in ‘Below is Flat Up There’, the Old Pimlico Library is, delightfully, made an archive once more.

REVIEW: Barry Flanagan at Tate Britain

Published: LONDON CONFIDENTIAL, 8th November 2011

"Barry Flannigan at Tate Britain Review. Thalia Allington-Wood's interest is sparked by the artist's early works."

Never much of a fan of Barry Flanagan’s famous bronze Hares (the large-eared leaping creatures of his later work that provided the artist with financial security and public popularity), I held slight trepidation attending this exhibition. Yet Flanagan’s ‘Early Works’ from 1965 – 1982 are a delight: subtle, but incredibly powerful.

If unaccustomed to the objects of Flanagan’s early years, Tate chucks you right in at the deep end. Walk through the entrance of this exhibition and before you stands ‘Aaing j gni aa’, an abstract, somewhat ridiculous sculpture of bulging shapes made from different coloured fabric packed tight with sand, one with a singular flower poking out of the top. It is an object that would sit well in a contortion of Serge Danot’s wonderful children’s TV show The Magic Roundabout.

Needless to say, it is not advised to search for a particular meaning behind such work. Flanagan’s art is precisely about confuting such cultural practice. His work playfully scrambles codes and alters perception.

Take ‘4 casb 2 '67’, in which towering monoliths in brilliant blue stand solidly rising from the ground, a large thick rope winding between them. These trunks provide all the expectations of traditional sculptural columns: they are weighty, overbearing and solid. Yet step closer and these qualities are suddenly undermined. Made from canvas filled with sand, their form is malleable; the tubes stretch at the seams, struggling to contain the grains within. The columns are, in fact, tentative and vulnerable.

Likewise ‘June 2’ 69’, a large work in room three, sticks two fingers up at standard artistic language. A large rectangle of fabric, thick and roughly cut with frayed edges, is propped up by knarled hazel braches. The materials used to create a traditional painting are presented and fulfill their usual functions – the wood still holds up the canvas as would a frame, and the canvas is still stretched by the wood to be visible to the viewer. Yet the supporting wood, normally hidden behind a painted surface, is now the focus, becoming drawn lines dividing the image.

In similar vein, and a favourite of mine, ‘untitled (carving no. 13/81)’ makes hard lime wood look like soft clay squeezed by a human hand. Flanagan’s work subverts what one expects from the sculptural form.

Hugely influential upon his work was author Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), who wrote ‘Ubu Roi’, later championed later by the Dadaists and Surrealists as the first absurdist drama. The word ‘absurd’ befits the work of Barry Flanagan quite aptly. 

In ‘Ubu Roi’, provocative Papa Turd wipes a soiled toilet cloth over his guests’ dinner in the first act. ‘Heap 4’, a smaller piece by Flanagan consisting of long, flaccid, fabric tubes in green, purple and yellow draped over each other in a pile, resembles something not far from the name of Jarry’s farcical character.

Despite complementary colours, ‘Heap 4’ made me rather nauseous, and it is this feeling of stomach turning which gets to the heart of Flanagan’s brilliance. His work holds a wonderful tactility that is a force to be reckoned with.

Hessian, rough wood, sand, rope and unpolished stone: all the materials Flanagan uses are raw and sensory. When rope digs into tight sacks, as with several of the pieces on show, images of bound flesh are evoked and ones hairs crawl. A pale washed canvas with a delicate spiral cut from the center and hanging down loosely like an apple peel, conjured images of flayed skin. 

There are moments of wonderful humor too. Such as ‘Poem for the Lips’, a work on paper whose stream of letters make ones mouth contort in pouts, goldfish like, when read out loud; and ‘A Nose in Repose’, a carved stone loosely resembling the human snout, resting proudly on a Jenga formation of wooden blocks.

When I entered Tate Britain on a recent windswept Sunday to see this show, the entrance of John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings was clustered with hubbub and bustle. However, Flanagan’s work should not be missed. It is a truly wonderful exhibition, full of evocative work, and deserves to be far more populated with curious visitors. Martin’s fire and brimstone there might not be, but sometimes slow-burners are all the more rewarding.

LINK:  http://www.londonconfidential.co.uk/Arts-and-Entertainment/Art/Barry-Flannigan-at-Tate-Britain-Review

REVIEW: Phyllida Barlow

Published: LONDON FESTIVAL FRINGE, 20th October 2011

Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition at Houser and Wirth in Piccadilly closes this Saturday. So make haste – flag that cab or top up that oyster card – it’s blooming brilliant.

Huge, striking sculptures fill the gallery’s many spaces, demanding interaction and attention.

In the main room, an abstract sculptural forest reaches up into the ceiling. Large blocks with the appearance of concrete stand upon thin poles: craning your neck at these vertiginous objects feels intimidating and precarious.

Yet these seemingly heavy, dangerous blocks are in fact polystyrene. Like tricks in a joke shop: rubber plastic piles of vomit bought to horrify flat mates, Barlow’s work plays and deceives.

Materials are rough and ready. Smeared paint and slapped on concrete proliferate in the work on show. You can feel the process of making ooze from each artwork.

Many of the pieces feel as if landed from outer space.

In an upstairs room ominous and large painted plywood objects clutter the space, toppling and tumbling across the floor. In the attic, giant “pompoms”, as Barlow calls them, populate: bursts of garish multicolor in an otherwise shadowed hollow. Playful yet some how poignant. There is a sense of loss and neglect in their random placement.

Without subject or narrative, Barlow’s sculptures are visceral entities to experience of your own accord. What ever that accord may be, the art in this exhibition cannot help but arrest.

Highly recommended.

Until 22 October 2011, Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly

Link: http://londonfestivalfringe.com/general/post/?p=13097

REVIEW: Takashi Murakami at Gagosian Gallery

Published: LONDON CONFIDENTIAL, 2nd August 2011

 "Takashi Murakami Review: Thalia Allington-Wood visits the Gagosian Gallery… it speaks for itself"

STANDING in the anesthetically pristine space of Gagosian’s Britannia Street gallery, two achingly large breasts bulge and loom above my head.

Nipples covered in smooth white material, both fleshy sandbags strapped together with a garishly purple belt. So voluminous are they, the lithe body supporting them threatens to topple dangerously under their weight.

At five foot ten, I have to admit, looking at such objects from below is a novel experience. Rarely do I feel dwarfed by a pair of female mammary glands. I certainly have never felt Lilliputian by a pair resembling computer animation come to life. Large enough they could flatten me into a pancake.

But this is the artwork of Takashi Murakami, popular Japanese artist extraordinaire. Whose smiling flowers adorn limited edition handbags; who covered a condom packet in precious stones in collaboration with Pharrell Williams in 2009; who placed an anime style sculpture of a squat naked king in the coronation room at Versailles. An act that, of course, met with French public outcry, but was somewhat genius in my opinion. A larger culture clash would be difficult to find.

I don’t know why I expected anything less.

‘3m Girl’ (2011), made from fiberglass reinforced plastic and steel, is the artwork in question. A towering, hideous display of cartoon fetishism: red high heels, stockings, tightened straps, dog collar, pointed gem riddled nails. All are present; as large spangled eyes and a miniature nose bend down to greet you.

No one has ever accused Murakami of being subtle. This is a work, like all the others in the room, which shouts its subject matter loud and clear.

Sex and fantasy anyone?  We’ve got it in spades.

In the past I’ve always found Murakami’s work incredibly entertaining. He has a sense of humour, without doubt. Anyone who titles a seriously polished and incredibly large sculpture of a gold penis, ‘Mr. Big Mushroom’, and a matching gargantuan silver vagina, ‘Mrs. Clam’ (both 2011). Each of their fronts are adorned with smiling faces resembling Pac-Man, which are guaranteed to bring on a smile.

But beyond this light entertainment, (the laughs are often easy ones), his work seems somewhat hollow. It’s the same feeling with the work of artist Jeff Koons, to which Murakami is constantly compared. Reproducing everyday objects on a grand scale or many times over is all very well. My magpie instinct can happily find enjoyment in Koon’s giant metallic balloons for a time. But then what? Usually one walks away profoundly unaffected.

Takashi Murakami’s work at the Gagosian show failed to alter my opinion. As spectator I felt respect, occasional delight, but also dissatisfaction.

Respect because with Murakami’s work comes technical brilliance. Standing in front of ‘Nurse Ko2’ (2011), a life-size three-dimensional sculpture of a scantily clad nurse, cross-shaped, blood-filled syringe in hand, is to experience the uncanny valley in reverse. So much like a computer animation does she appear, your eyes can trick you into momentarily believing that she is in fact two-dimensional: a visual slippage both unnerving and impressive.

Delight in ridiculous moments: staring up a giant matron’s frilly skirt, her knickers wedged between two stupidly spherical buttocks, for example, while in the serious environment of a contemporary gallery. Murakami’s work is a colourful, fiberglass assault on the eyes: garish, playful, frequently bordering on ludicrous.

Disappointment due to lack of profundity: these renditions of cartoon sexual fantasies, with tiny, slender proportions and large, violet-coloured, doe eyes, titillate, but to little effect and say little in return. If the show makes any comment at all, it is on societies long held desire for unrealistic, pornographic imagery.

By adopting, in two paintings entitled ‘Shunga: Gibbons’ and ‘Shunga: Bow Wow’ (both 2010), the erupting, vein bursting, members found in Shunga, a style of Japanese erotic art that reached its peak of popularity in the Edo period (commonly dated between 1603 and 1868), Murakami reminds that sexual art of the past has flung the stone as far from reality as the similarly phantasmal and illusory images of the contemporary Japanese graphics his work most frequently employs.

But this is hardly a groundbreaking exposition on sexual desires or the sex industry.

In moments of cynicism, especially remembering that Gagosian is a power force of a commercial gallery, this show can seem to merely audaciously play into the hands of Murakami’s large army of collectors. Murakami’s work sells extremely well; his supposedly erotic work, even better. ‘My Lonesome Cowboy’, for example, sold at auction in 2008 for a whopping fifteen million.

Works that prompt deep contemplation you will not find at Gagosian; a laugh you may. If Murakami wishes to provoke, he fails to do so. The pornographic nature of the work is never shocking. His work is art of ambivalence.

Takashi Murakami
June 27th – August 5th, 2011

Gagosian Gallery
6 – 24 Britannia Street
 WC1X 9JD
 02078419960
 Tues – Sat: 10am – 6pm

Link: http://www.londonconfidential.co.uk/Arts-and-Entertainment/Art/Takashi-Murakami-Review

REVIEW: 'The Walls are Talking' at The Whitworth Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 8th February 2010

"The Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture, Thalia Allington-Wood on the Whitworth Art Gallery going to the wall"

Wallpaper is decorative and domestic; it is chosen by a homeowner to alter their private space, to create a specifically desired atmosphere and display their character.

Wallpaper is by no means a neutral medium, and it is its power and poignancy that the artists of the Whitworth’s new exhibition draw upon, manipulating and subverting its connotations of home, comfort and identity.

The show begins in the Whitworth’s South Gallery, which has been plastered with conceptual artist Thomas Demand’s ‘Ivy’ wallpaper. Demand has turned the room into a leafy enclosure; the walls merge into the park that extends outside the large windows flooding the space with winter sun. It feels like entering a secret garden: mischievous, innocent, and playful. Sensations that prove uncomfortable and disturbing when considering the piece is inspired by a child murderer’s lair.

Artist Lisa Hecht uses wallpaper to present the home as a place of imprisonment, with the pattern of an unforgiving metal fence. The viewer would become enclosed within Hecht’s papered space, the sky blue background connoting a freedom beyond the walls denied to those inside.

As well as a possible prison, the home is often depicted through these wallpapers as a place where appearance is a mask covering a darker, more vulnerable reality. Rosemarie Trockel’s wallpaper depicts a photograph of Trockel’s sculptural piece ‘Egg Curtain’, the hanging hollow eggs symbolising the female fertility and birth of children expected within the home, but also the fragility of this celebrated norm, so easily smashed, so often unobtainable.

Catherine Bertola’s subtle and tactile piece ‘Beyond the Looking Glass’ highlights the pretence of ideal domestic life, and the deception that lies behind many a perfect family. Bertola, using ash collected from her own hearth, creates a 19th century floral pattern, in which the flowers peel off the four walls, some scattered on the floor. The title, recalling the sequel book to Alice in Wonderland, suggests functionality. This is a domestic space beginning to fall apart before our very eyes. Similarly, in Erwan Venn’s visual installation, flower patterns fall from the wall to the sound of smashing cutlery.
Virgil Marti, Bullies, 1992-2001Francesco Simeti, Arabian Nights wallpaper, 2003

Other artists, such as Francesco Simeti adopt traditional 18th century designs to highlight modern political issues. ‘Arabian Nights’ inserts photographs of Afghan refugees into romantic painted landscapes, commenting on the many disrupted homes caused by war. In another, a pattern of acorns suggesting birth and growth are contrasted to photographic images of men removing toxic matter in white protective clothing. These images of death, contamination and poison framed by elaborate borders, suggest the pain and disruption that is found behind the façade of many a seemingly perfect domestic situation.

Though this all sounds heavy going, and pain and trauma certainly reside behind the decorative appearance of much of this wallpaper, comedy is also to be found. David Shrigley is a sharply funny as ever, while Sarah Lucas’ ‘Tits in Space’, in which cigarettes are repeatedly coiled into two pert cones, might be a comment on the sexualisation of everyday objects but comes with a healthy pinch of salt.

Many of the pieces would have benefited hugely from covering a larger space; much of the wallpaper is displayed on canvas frames. The truly garish and hallucinogenic effect of Vergil Marti’s luminous flowers and high school bullies would be truly overpowering and oppressive if slathered over an entire enclave; the disorientating nature of Damien Hirst’s kaleidoscopic butterflies impressive rather than just pretty. This highlights the technical problem of wallpaper as art: once plastered onto a wall, the only way to remove wallpaper is to destroy it, and one does not destroy a Warhol lightly.

The range and versatility of the display is impressive. The artists use wallpaper to manipulate domestic spaces of comfort into places of fear and anxiety. Wallpaper becomes a medium for social critique and current motifs of modern thought. Though not many would suit a comfortable living room, the wallpaper to be found at The Whitworth is certainly wallpaper to make you think.

6th Feb-3rd May 2010, Whitworth Art Gallery


LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/The-Walls-Are-Talking-Wallpaper-Art-and-Culture

REVIEW: Facing East and Artist Rooms at Manchester Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 4th February 2010

"Facing East and ARTIST ROOMS review: Thalia Allington-Wood recommends the latest Manchester Art Gallery exhibitions but she doesn't love them"

‘Facing East’ is an explosion of vibrant colour and bold artworks that you could dismiss as merely playful. You get pieces such as Takashi Murakami’s manga style mushrooms with wide circular eyes and Chen Lei’s ‘Big Kiss’, a sculpture of a small child, kissing a polar bear that balances from his lips.

Yet under their bright extravagance lies unexpected sincerity and meaning. Yue Minjun’s garish painting which features a group of identical men, skin a luminous pink, laughing uncontrollably. Rather than humorous, this piece is disconcerting. The wide grinning mouths, with rows of identical white teeth and fathomless black interiors, are intimidating. This becomes significant in light of Minjun’s use of Christian Renaissance iconography.

Laughter in the Renaissance was considered a dangerous activity, signaling potential influence from the devil; open body orifices were how the Devil accessed the soul. These men are symbolic of everyman but also demonic, they sport small horns upon their heads, bringing the moral identity of the viewer into question.

Sprawled across the gallery floor lies Bharti Kher’s life-size elephant, whose body is covered with sperm like bindis. Bindis are traditionally worn by Indian women to signal their married status and thus, indirectly, their ability to respectably bear children. The sculpture is thus paradoxical; the elephant’s position suggests it is dead, though the pattern that adorns it signals life and birth. What is first an artwork of death becomes one of hope.

This exhibition does however pose a problem; there is a lack of connection between the artworks. The exhibition’s name places emphasis on location. Yet loose geographical proximity could produce a dangerously colonial generalization or ‘othering’ of these artworks.

To group three countries with such different cultures together in one room under the heading ‘East’, is to fail to provide the viewer with a clear understanding of the cultural background or significance of each. ‘Facing East’ is the exhibition equivalent of a pick ‘n’ mix bag: somewhat random and lacking coherence, but also highly enjoyable.

Walk into the adjoining room and you will find the work of Ron Mueck. Mueck, originally a model maker and puppeteer, produces hyperrealist sculptures of human figures that are technically incredible. Standing above the miniature ‘Spooning Couple’, it is amazing to view the tiny, slightly overgrown, toenails of the woman’s feet, the individual hairs that protrude down the man’s legs, the wrinkles that adorn their eyes.

Mueck’s work, like that of ‘Facing East’, also contains an element of play. Entering the room you are confronted with a giant naked man, sitting in a position that suggests both surprise and fear at your presence; his knuckles white from gripping the edge of his stool, his lips pursed, his body leaning backwards. Mueck’s sculptures create a believable presence, while simultaneously being utterly fantastical. It feels like being surrounded by fairytale characters.

They are also highly emotive on a very guttural and sensual level. The subtle body language of the spooning couple suggests discontent and distance despite their close proximity to one another; the giant man, despite his size, evokes human weakness and vulnerability.

I left, though, uncomfortable, feeling that not much else lay behind these impressively executed sculptures. Mueck’s use of scale manipulates the viewers’ emotional response very specifically, yet there is no apparent imaginative or intellectual meaning, no subversion or argument behind these feelings, other than that these models look remarkably, eerily real. Does this matter? Maybe not.

After all, I liked these sculptures and enjoyed viewing them, and that could be all that really matters.

Facing East: Recent works from China, India and Japan from the Frank Cohen Collection and ARTIST ROOMS Ron Mueck. 4 Feb – 11 April 2010.

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/Facing-East-and-ARTIST-ROOMS-review

REVIEW: ExInked Exhibition

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 26th November 2009

"ExInked exhibition: Thalia Allington-Wood questions whether getting a tattoo of a spiny lobster on your back is really a good idea"

Heralded as a ‘social experiment’ to celebrate Charles Darwin’s bicentennial birthday, this exhibition organised by art co-operative Ultimate Holding Company will certainly leave a mark on you, particularly if you're one of those who have volunteered to take part.

Getting something permanently inked upon your body is not to be taken lightly, especially if it is a rare type of fungus.

The concept? 100 endangered species. 100 drawings. 100 tattoos upon 100 volunteers. The result? 100 ambassadors for animal conservation, each with their very own permanent reminder of disappearing wildlife.

Each species is available for one person only. The tattoos are free. To be a volunteer an application must be filled in, with a preference of three choices and a statement to support the application.

The exhibition itself is simple and effective. The drawings, each on a plain piece of cartridge paper, are displayed on a lit table in the centre of the room. You look down at the images, as if into a museum cabinet. The drawings are presented like dead butterflies rather than as artworks hanging upon a wall; a reminder of the future that remains for many of the animals shown.

The ink illustrations are delicate depictions that recall old encyclopaedias and scientific nature drawings. Meticulous and precise. From corn flower to spiny lobster, water vole to tadpole shrimp, long-horned bee to golden eagle. The variety is a stark comment on the pervasive damage being done to species in the UK. Three conservation groups, the Marine Conservation Society, Buglife and The People's Trust for Endangered Species, were all involved in creating the exhibition.

All this is very comfortable and conventional until we get to the tattoos. Ultimate Holding Company has enlisted the expertise of Ink Vs Steel to tattoo the volunteers live in the exhibition. It seems rather sinister, certainly masochistic, to watch people have a drawing of a scarlet malachite beetle being scratched into their flesh with a needle.

Similarly, despite being undoubtedly a worthy cause, is it a good reason to get a tattoo? What does an ink drawing on someone’s back, which will remain for the most part underneath a T-shirt, really do to help conservation?

Getting something permanently inked upon your body is not to be taken lightly, especially if it is a rare type of fungus. When walking around the exhibition, it did feel slightly like people were shopping for a free tattoo rather than supporting the preservation of endangered species.

I just hope that the people raising their hands for the ‘boring millipede’ or ‘erratic ant’ have thought long and hard about the fact that tattoos are often judged to represent their owners.

Whatever the results, ExtInked is certainly contentious. Let's just hope the species last beyond the tattoos.

ExtInked, 108 Chapel Street, Salford, M3 5DW, 10am-6pm, until 29 November. Tattooing commences on 26 November at 7.30pm.

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Arts/ExInked-exhibition

REVIEW: 'The Social Lives of Objects'

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 3rd June 2009

 "The Social Lives of Objects: Thalia Allington-Wood is disturbed by the mermaids at Castlefield Gallery"

Walking into The Social Lives of Objects is like entering a curiosity shop. Objects from around the world, unexpected and delightful, stand on shelves, tables and plinths. Manipulated, adapted and skewed, the sculptures and multimedia images of this exhibition are simultaneously comic and disturbing.

The artwork playfully examines our relationship with material objects by distorting them and provoking our expectations. Two brushes are placed together and initially look like a set of false teeth, a tennis racquet is filled with gridded glass, another re-strung to have a circular hole in the middle. The objects are everyday yet utterly surprising in their new forms. Their associations are altered, their signification changed.

All the objects used by artists Hilary Jack, Lisa Penny and Dallas Seitz have been found, whether in charity shops, skips or on eBay. None of them are new, they each have an individual past, a previous life, and it is this that the works seek to explore and articulate.

Hilary Jack’s wonderful ‘Centaur Departs Damaged Herd’ comprises of carved Kenyan springbok, standing upon a variety of salvaged wooden tables. Protruding from their bare heads are gnarled and forked branches, antler like. The composition of wood in its natural form, joined and moulded to the manufactured products it serves to make, tells the story of the sculptured springbok’s happening. Once tree, now sculpture.

Dallas Seitz’s work is far more disturbing and uncomfortable. He mutilates objects embedded in family history (taxidermy animals, bones, teeth, a voodoo bust taken from his grandmother’s bathroom) into ominous, mythical and gothic sculptures. Rather than replicate and explain the objects' histories, Seitz creates new ones that maintain respect for their past. The most off-putting element is the pleasure they give the viewer.

In one, a mermaid skeleton is created with the tail of a fish, goat bones and a modelled human head. This mermaid has in no way emerged from a beloved Disney flick. Another, ‘Voodoo Princess’, shows a, now politically incorrect, plaster sculpture of a beautiful black woman. Her eyes are replaced with those once belonging to a doll, teeth are hung around her neck and within her hair, coral earrings adorn her, their aesthetic mocking and highlighting the grotesque nature of her other appropriated accessories.

Seitz’s work creates strong emotions if nothing else; horror mixed with fascination, fear with admiration. They highlight our love of the strange and obscure, our interest in all that is opposed to the norm.

Interspersed among these is the work of Lisa Penny, whose collaged pieces reiterate the repetition and borrowing that takes place within history, trends, and object associations. By placing images together, removing them from their original context, or cutting out part of their composition, Penny forces us to look at them in a new light. Like all of the artists in this intriguing and clever exhibition, Penny challenges and reorders the meanings of individual objects and in doing so highlights the associations that fill our daily discourses.

The Social Lives of Objects, Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, Wednesday-Sunday, 1pm-6pm, until 19 July, free, 0161 832 8034, www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/The-Social-Lives-of-Objects

REVIEW: Mooch and Revolve Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 28th April 2009

"Mooch and Revolve gallery: Thalia Allington-Wood is appalled and delighted by the Triangle's new commercial art gallery" 

Walking down Cross Street on your way to the new Mooch and Revolve gallery, there are certain things you can be forgiven for expecting. White walls, and lots of bright lighting are two of them. The sound of busy shoppers echoing loudly are not.

However, when it comes to the contemporary art gallery checklist, Mooch and Revolve have many a tick. The large ground floor space is a flood with daylight and the décor is a reassuring snow colour. The many walls were, and presumably still are, lined with many paintings: always a good sign when in an art gallery. (You think I jest, but the Pompidou in Paris recently held a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958). So, one more tick for Mooch.

On the opening night, even more ticks could be awarded. A substantial amount of free wine drinking occurred. Tick. Suitably dressed people considerately milled around the space, nodding their heads as one does when viewing artworks. Tick. (Take note, to do this to best effect one’s head must be tilted, though ever so slightly. Squinting additionally goes down very well. While the accompanying gentle wag of a pen, or in this case a cocktail sausage stick, adds certain panache). We seem to be off to a good start.
 

Yet, some of the work, if I am truly honest, I thought was awful, dreadful even. I will name no names, as this is merely my opinion, you can go and judge for yourself.

I am all for affordable art and supporting local artists, but this does not mean the art cannot be well executed or mildly original. Replicating scenes from famous films and manipulating them in the style of Photoshop’s ‘cutout’ button is neither inventive nor mildly intriguing.
But I will hold my tongue, as simultaneously much of the work I enjoyed greatly. Rebecca Wilmer’s heavily textured pieces are subtle and moving. They are both abstract and realistic; the layered roughness of the paintwork creates the very essence of the rural landscapes she paints. Similarly, Barry Spence executes his fantastical seascapes with skill; his use of light and brush stroke creates dreamlike images.

Another favorite was the work of Michael Hitchens, whose screen-printed, geometric urban landscapes are well composed and capture perfectly the ordered, yet chaotic environment cities provide. Bold use of colour and sometimes unexpected angles add a unique stance to his images.

Then, of course, there is Andrew Brooks, whose layered and reworked digital photographs are surreal, stunning and captivating. However, it would be nice to see a bit of variety: the works of his on show have already been displayed at both From Space and Urbis.

What is so nice about this gallery is that there is little pretence and much honesty. It is a gallery that aims to be accessible to the public, to show affordable work for people to buy, and thus display work that can hang suitably in a hallway. It is not therefore the most exciting of exhibitions, but one that does its job very well indeed. Tick.

Mooch and Revolve Gallery, Triangle Shopping Centre, Exchange Square, Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm, www.mooch-art.co.uk, www.revolvegallery.co.uk

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Mooch-and-Revolve-gallery

BLOG: "A Question on Art": Manuel Saiz at Castlefield Gallery

Published: 'Art City' Blog, MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS, April 2009 (no longer online)

"A Question on Art:: Manuel Saiz at Castlefield Gallery" 

What is art? Not an original question, but one Manuel Saiz tackles head on in his solo show Private Party. Keep Out at Castlefield Gallery. A title that aptly comments on how, for many, contemporary art is illusive and seemingly pointless. It is an exclusive form far less approachable, and far harder to initially appreciate, than classical realist paintings.

Contemporary art is ambiguous in meaning and talent: artists present painted dots, a urinal, or a room full of air-conditioned air as artwork, (see the Pompidou’s current show Voids, a retrospective of the many empty exhibitions in recent art history).

Yet Saiz is quick to make the distinction between ‘anything as art’ and ‘art itself’. In The Two Teams Team, a short film in which two actors discuss the relations between video art and cinema, (contemporary art and traditional), it is made clear that modern art works through the intellect: integral to an artwork’s success is the idea it attempts to indirectly convey rather than the technical skill of its execution.

His Social Structures (everybody is an artist) utilizes Joseph Beuys famous words to remark on the range of possibilities, content and attitudes in modern art. Three actors repeat the words over and over again in varying emotions, from elated to blasé to positively upset. It highlights the important role the audience holds in creating meaning.

If you are still suitably confounded to the meaning of art, what you think it is, traditional or contemporary, realist or abstract, Saiz comes to the rescue once more with his What is Art Flowchart, a poster the visitor can take away to contemplate. Using binary statements that demand yes-no answers, the flowchart guides you to your final ‘art judgment’. Whether it is that art is objects that create beauty, the audience themselves, what is displayed by galleries or even that everything is art.

Manuel Saiz addresses the identity of contemporary art and the relationship it has with the audience and society with wonderful comic and intellectual work. Private Party. Keep Out is a compact but sharp and poignant exhibition, well worth a visit.

Manuel Saiz: Private Party. Keep Out

06 February to 22 March 2009

Castlefield Gallery

2 Hewitt Street, M15 4GB

http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk

Wednesday to Sunday 1pm – 6 pm

REVIEW: 40 Days of Solitude at Nexus Café

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 25th March 2009

"40 Days of Solitude at Nexus Café: Thalia Allington-Wood on the art of doing nothing"

Nexus Café is pretty unassuming. With its dull grey front and ambiguous stairwell leading into the room of sofas and coffees below, you could very easily miss it. However, since 40 Days of Solitude began it has undoubtedly been getting a little bit more attention than usual. As I approached, people walked past, shopping bags bustling, doing a double take, and pausing bewildered to take a better look.

And why, you might well ask? Because, for the 40 days of Lent usually reserved for various forms of fasting, Nexus Café are sticking people in a glass box. Well, not quite a glass box David Blaine style, but near enough.

Their glass-fronted installation space (shop window to you and me) will be occupied each day, between the hours of 9.30am and 7pm, with a lone individual. Sometimes they will be under the guise of an artist, sometimes not. All they will be allowed is three items of their choice (electronic methods of communication not permitted). All that will be bestowed upon them is: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Bible, water and a singular meal’. Desert Island cliché fully in place. What happens next?

Answer: who knows? While in captivity, the inhabitants are free to do and create whatever they wish (except nudity). Alternatively they are free to do absolutely nothing whatsoever (watching the web footage it would seem some have merely taken the opportunity to catch up on some well needed sleep).

This is a shame. Nexus Café are providing an unusual and uniquely regulated studio space, which should provoke intriguing results, from sculpture to installation to performance.

Though with our current obsession with reality TV, maybe watching people do nothing is exactly what people like to do? The viewing numbers attracted by the Big Brother house eating breakfast say it all.

The fish bowl experience must be an odd one. Never unobserved, the inhabitants of 40 Days of Solitude are constantly filmed by a webcam and goggled at by people doing their shopping and sipping lattes. I imagine it makes you feel rather self-conscious. One woman hid herself behind an umbrella, others flit from one awkward, attempting-casual pose to the next. Nine and a half hours could seem like a very long time.

Which is why the most interesting of residencies have been those with a plan: those who have manipulated and altered the space and responded creatively to their new environment. One girl created an intricate cocoon out of multicolored string, a haven from the pubic eye. Another made large and bright 3D shapes and hung them from the ceiling like a slightly surreal mobile, turning the stairwell into a dreamlike environment.

A different artist attempted to reverse the psychological effect of his captivity by taking photos of everyone who stopped to look at him. Then promptly proceeded to grid the room with orange paper, making it into a geometric vortex. Whether this neon surrounding enhanced his experience I can’t say. It would have given me a headache.

Last time I was there, the artist in occupation had created a wonderful installation titled ‘The Practice of Generosity’. One of her three items appeared to have been a sack full of lovely earthy red sand. Scattered across the steps, the earth was compacted into small castles of circular shape, like miniature Towers of Babels, indented and crumbling.

To quote their own strapline: ‘40 days, 40 people, 40 experiences’. Some are good and some are bad. This temporary and multi-faceted exhibition is an entertaining idea that has a lot of potential.

40 Days of Solitude. Until Sunday 12 April. Nexus Art Café, Dale Street. Open 10am-7pm. 0161 236 0100. http://www.nexusonline.org.uk

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/40-Days-of-Solitude-at-Nexus-Caf

REVIEW: 'Subversive Spaces', Whitworth Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 9th February 2009

"Subversive Spaces: Whitworth Art Gallery"

You can see nothing. The darkness is suffocating and engulfing. Stumbling, groping along the walls, you experience Gregor Schneider’s astonishing ‘Kinderzimmer’. The content and message as dark as the space you explore alone.

The familiar and sunlit South Gallery of the Whitworth has been transformed. It has become shrouded and claustrophobic, the temporary container for other transplanted spaces: replicas of a child’s abandoned domestic space.

The duplication and displacement of the rooms, alongside the feeling of confinement in ‘Kinderzimmer’, articulates the Surrealist thought explored by the exhibition.

A poignant and effective introduction to the magnificent ‘Subversive Spaces’, Schneider’s work expresses the sense of constraint found in the home and the solitude and vulnerability of open, designed spaces. It physically represents the Freudian theory of repressed childhood within the dark subconscious, while also highlighting the disruption of space that fascinated and preoccupied the Surrealists.

In his manifesto of 1924, the self-proclaimed Surrealist leader, Andre Breton emphasized the importance of boundaries that “have been assigned even to experience”. It is the narrative of these boundaries, both physical and mental, and the resistance to their “cage” that the surrealists sought to express through exploration of the unconscious mind. Art to them was a means to transcend controls exerted by society and habit.

‘Subversive Spaces’ examines two distinct legacies from this movement: the domestic space and the disturbances it contains or causes. Followed by walking within urban environments, the surrealist preoccupation with wandering to discover hidden spaces and emotions. In both there is a focus on hysteria, childhood experience, abuse, our dreams and mental illness as a means to subvert the traditional and familiar.

Each piece undermines your expectations and challenges assumed perceptions. The works seek to disrupt the safe and comfortable. As you walk from room to room, distorted bodies, ominous settings and menacing everyday objects stop you in your tracks.

Sarah Lucas’s provocative and prostrate furniture copulate as you enter, their personification realizing potential unconscious desires. The dining room setting further highlighting the undercurrent of repressed motives and fantasies that fill everyday discourse.

From here you encounter a medley of the unexpected. Robert Gober’s prostrate limb protrudes from the wall, while Mona Hatoum suggests torture with her oversized tomato slicer. Markus Schinwald photographs flexible and objectified contortionists, while Lucy Gunning shows remarkable climbing skills. Traveling around a stark and bare room without once touching the floor Gunning literally climbs the walls in her captivity. In enacting the anxiety felt in constriction, her work interrogates the restrictions felt by some women in the family space.

Leaving the home and entering the city, confines remain but in different form. Francis Alys draws our attention to the British overuse of railings in his playful films, walking aimlessly around central London rhythmically chiming his exploration with a wooden stick. Similarly Alex Villar’s ‘Temporary Occupations’ comically highlights the physical barriers and enclosures that fill our environments, as he jumps and climbs into pointless inaccessible spaces. While both William Anastasi and Katie Holten use the city’s movements to produce ‘automatic’ and spontaneous patterns that contrast the regular motion and repetition of the environment.

‘Subversive Spaces’ is truly excellent. This is the Manchester art scene pushing its limits, eliminating them, and providing something at international level. The exhibition moves coherently and fluidly from room to room, theme to theme. Greats such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte stand next to contemporary artists, highlighting the continuing dialogue Surrealist thought has with more recent art. Thought provoking, visually striking and packed to the brim with impressive content, it can’t be faulted.

Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art, The Whitworth Art Gallery, 7 February - 4 May 2009

Link: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Subversive-Spaces-Whitworth-Art-Gallery

PDF: Subversive Spaces, Manchester Confidential, 9th February 2009

REVIEW/FEATURE:'From Space' shop and Laura White at Castlefield Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 8th December 2008

"From Space’ shop and Laura White at Castlefield Gallery: Thalia Allington-Wood becomes the princess of single evening art-shopping and Gallery-going"

It’s bloody cold outside and the air is sharp as I walk past Salford station in search of ‘From Space’. The self proclaimed ‘new art and fashion shop’ I have been sent to assess. The Christmas lights and wafts of festive sausages I left behind in Deansgate place further bricks upon my shoulders. Bricks entitled ‘Christmas is looming’ and ‘It really is time to start Christmas shopping’. Maybe, I think, just maybe this shop will be my tinsel covered savior.

Tucked away, ‘From Space’ is an endearingly small but effectively filled shop. The showcase for resident Islington Mill artists, along with other artistic pieces from further afield. This is a place to come for unique, handmade, and sometimes rather pointless items to fill a home, (or the underneath of a Christmas tree). Most at nice and un-daunting prices to boot.

An eclectic array of art lines the walls, to suit many a taste. Andrew Brooks is of particular note. Artist of the forthcoming 'Reality Hack: Hidden Manchester' at Urbis, Brooks’ photographs are surreal and rather beautiful (see review this week). Extremely sharp portrayals of cityscapes, woodlands, derelict buildings and ships at sea, that have been layered and reworked digitally till the colours and light hold an ethereal and mystical quality. They have an unexpectedly euphoric effect upon the viewer.

Also worth a mention is Liz Scrine’s absolutely huge candleholder, the ceramic pipes reminiscent of medieval, Gormanghastesque, scenes, flickering corridors and looming shadows.

‘From Space’ is almost a bohemian lifestyle store. Not only do they wish to sell you adornments for your walls, but to dress you in artistic clothes, supply your bookshelves with artistic books, fill your living room with artistic music, and provide artistic postcards for you to inform your friends of just how artistic you are.

However, it does so in a friendly and laidback manner, without too much self-artistic awareness, which is refreshing. ‘From Space’ is full of gift potential and worth a visit.

Having by now finished my complimentary artistic beer, I head back into the cold night, one art print in bag, for a well wrapped stroll towards another art related drink. This time at the Castlefied gallery, and the preview of Laura White’s ‘If I had a monkey I wouldn’t need a TV’. I can feel my very existence turning into oil paint and gouache.

Now I like Castlefield gallery, it has enough glass windows and white walls to swell my artistic pride sufficiently, and Laura White’s show is terrific. Using the gallery as a studio, the works were made on site and as such the relation between artwork and space is articulated eloquently.

Describing her own work as ‘imagery mess’, White’s art is a modern sensory explosion. Plastic animals, magazine cutouts and household goods that appear to have stepped out of the £1 shop are amalgamated into abstract and unexpected sculptures. Sponges, clothes pegs, feather dusters and suitcases are all present.

Images and objects are removed from their expected location and associations. Advertisements are shredded and mixed with clay to form a molding material; images are projected on to a pile of blowup balls and billboard posters. An Umbrella is filled with photographed animals. A huge media made stalactite hangs from the ceiling.

Laura White’s work is fun. It recalls Bahktin’s carnivalesque: enjoyment and festivity suspending and manipulating the official into freedom. The normal functions objects hold are disregarded, White makes you look at daily commodities from a different perspective.

Sipping some white wine, I catch my reflection in the window and am horrified to find that my art saturated evening has turned me into a Picasso. Wonky eyes not being the look of the season I head home, to do some decidedly non-artistic shopping at Lidl on the way.
 
Link: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/From-Space-shop-and-Laura-White-at-Castlefield-Gallery

REVIEW: Jan Chlebik, Artland Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 2nd December 2008

"Manchester and New York: Visit the Exhibition"

Walking into the relatively new Artland gallery, a small, personal and welcoming space, I did not expect to leave so moved.

Jan Chlebik’s photographs are stunning. Black and white prints that capture the emotion and beauty of urban cityscapes. Towers and office blocks become grids, patterns. Car filled streets are abstracted into blurred silhouettes. These are images familiar and alien. Surprising and poignant.

Chlebik’s images express the experience of city life. Of being lost, insignificant, within a sea of people, buildings and production, and of simultaneously being empowered as an individual. Surrounded by opportunity and activity.

This might sound odd as the photographs present a distinct absence of people. Moments of solitude are snapped by Chlebik’s camera lens. Early mornings, quiet evenings. His cities are still, empty and in wait.

Yet in Chlebik’s photographs it is the people in the indistinguishable cars, and behind the many windows and doors that are presented. It is what we cannot see, what the buildings contain. Voices articulated by the city landscapes. Manchester and New York stand side by side. The line of difference between the two cities becomes undefined. The order of the photographs jumbled. Buildings are shown to be the universal motif of human assertions. They express our collective ambition and also our individual routines. They are evidence of our existence. As Chlebik states, buildings and rooftops are ‘a snapshot of life going on, continuous and all encompassing’.

Either sharp, starkly contrasted, blurred or grainy the photographs of Manchester and New York present unexpected and alternative angles on familiar destinations. These different techniques show the versatility of our urban landscapes. In hazy backgrounds, the buildings rise through the mist like phantoms. In some, the solid buildings slice into far reaching skies. Modern Towers of Babel. Roads that carry solitary cars into harsh white distances feature heavily: journeys being made, beginning or ending, images of potential, independence and freedom. Clocks are also prominent. Time is shown frozen, but suggests it’s passing, evokes the visibility of change. Old churches next to glass towers: the collage and layering of historical architecture visible when walking through our streets.

The blurred images, highly contrasted, turn churches and skyscrapers into dark shadows. X-ray skeletons of daily urban existence. Chlebik’s use of light is wonderful. It shines from above, floats or sears ethereal on window pains and streets. In some, the lines are so sharp the buildings are almost returned to architectural graphics. Routine layered by the many streets and tiled by repetitive windows. Home is made surreal.

There is a sense of nostalgia. The Great Gatsby. Romance. Sadness. Hope. Glamour. Loss.  Past and future. All are invoked when standing before Chlebik’s photographs.

They are beautiful and absorbing images. Jan Chlebik’s work makes the minute and huge elements of the city graceful and bold. They articulate a sense of memory. Narrate the possibility present in Manchester, New York, and any urban space. Go and have a look. 

LINK: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Manchester-and-New-York-visit-this-exhibition

PDF:Jan Chlebik, Manchester Confidential, 2nd December 2008

REVIEW: Ally Wallace 'Stuck Cities', Victoria Baths

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 25th September 2008

"Ally Wallace 'Stuck Cities' at Victoria Baths"

 

I don’t like to say it, but when visiting Stuck Cities I spent more time marvelling at the beautiful building of Victoria Baths than I did the works of art. That is not to say I wasn’t impressed by Wallace’s instillation, but rather that the opportunity to explore and wander around the beautiful and decaying baths at your leisure is far too good to miss.

Ornate green tiles reach up to the ceiling, while transient light pours through stained glass windows on to impressive stairways. Mosaic fish even swim around your feet. Victoria Baths is a wonderful and fun piece of architecture. Walking around the echoing swimming pools, with the wooden seats of the theatre above and the bright blue paint peeling off the cubicles that line the room, is like being in a sepia coloured dream that is ever so slightly haunted. The emptiness of such a large and delicious space holds sorrowful tints. A building designed to be full of life now catching the sounds of solitary footsteps.

Ally Wallace’s main artwork that accommodates the first class pool is aesthetically successful. The huge square panels of newspaper which hang from the tall glass ceiling utilises and complements the space very well. The columns of text and boxed images of the broadsheets merge into the tiles of the pool and bring out the structural lines of the room. The fragility of the paper, suspended and motionless, emphasises the stillness of the derelict building, once alive and busy with people.

All locally sourced, the newspapers fade and yellow in time - disintegrating and becoming dilapidated just as the building has done. The stories relevant to a precise date or time period have been ‘frozen in the final installation’, the contents turned in to a graphic pattern. All of these elements poignantly reflect the history of Victoria Baths and its own pause in time, unused, empty and awaiting final restoration. The building is in limbo, as are the stories suspended inside.

The simplicity of Wallace’s delicate grid wall creates a wonderful new element to the space, interacting and bringing out the colours and shapes of its crumbling surrounding. Stuck Cities realises the size and height of the room, changes perspectives as you walk around and creates unexpected viewpoints of forgotten corners of the room.

My enjoyment of Stuck Cities meant I wished the exhibition had ended in the swimming pool. Wallace’s other works, displayed in the smaller adjoining rooms, in many ways tainted the impact of the main instillation. His small watercolours and newspaper sculptures seemed void of purpose and ill-thought out. The subtle peaches of the decorative windows captured my attention far better than the rolls of newspaper stuck together with bulldog clips and sporadic daubs of paint. This exhibition survives because of its magnificent home.

You should head down to this rather illusive exhibition (only open this coming Saturday and Sunday) even if installation doesn’t really float your boat. Do it for the baths I tell you, those wonderful baths.

There is an interesting exhibition on the history and renovation of the building, equipped with dated swimwear, audio memories and photos to boot. A magnificent building to explore and an aeratone to marvel at, which with its narrow, deep metal cylinder and red operating dials looks like some form of science fiction nightmare, but is in fact a swish personal Jacuzzi first developed as a treatment for mining injures in Scotland. Excellent stuff, and when you think the developers suggested turning it into a car park.

 

Link: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Ally-Wallace-iStuck-Citiesi-at-Victoria-Baths

PDF: Ally Wallace, Manchester Confidential, 25th September 2008 

REVIEW: Gwon Osang 'Deodorant Type', Manchester Art Gallery

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 7th July 2008

"Massive Horse Invades Manchester Art Gallery"

Deodorant Type, the new exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery makes interesting viewing. Korean artist Gwon Osang, in his first major UK show, fills the space with imposing realist sculptures that carry the power to confuse and challenge the viewer’s perception.
 
"These layered photographic surfaces give Osang’s sculptures a fragmented and therefore surreal appearance. The expressions and features of each individual model are occasionally skewed and unnatural, their proportions wrong."

In an attempt to move away from traditional sculpting materials and methods, which he finds, ‘suffocating’ and restrictive, Gwon Osang formed his current and signature technique, in which he uses photographs to create a composite image of his models on life size sculpted bodies.

These layered photographic surfaces give Osang’s sculptures a fragmented and therefore surreal appearance. The expressions and features of each individual model are occasionally skewed and unnatural, their proportions wrong. As a result the sculptures found in Deodorant Type are at times eerie, unnerving and intimidating. One such sculpture is an impressive horse mounted police officer, striking, proud and reminiscent of monumental equestrian sculptures of monarchs and princes. Another is that of Graham Massey, Manc muso, best known for his work as part of 808 State and pictured here.

Osang commented that he enjoys the 'contemporary visuality' photography achieves. It also brings an unavoidable realist stance to his work. These sculptures are real people who exist simultaneously and separately to the exhibition space, in the same clothes, making the same face. Osang cannot change them; the camera does not lie. Most of the sculptures featured in the exhibition were created from Osang’s month long residency in Manchester in 2007.

The poses of Osang’s sculptures are all those readily available in society, ads, and media. Osang describes his body formations as ‘very close to me and easily available…found around me or in any civilised city life on earth, through magazines or the internet’. They are positions that we are so used to seeing around us, we become almost unaware of them.

Though Osang states that he does not ‘really want audiences to understand or find something special by looking at my work’, this writer finds Osang’s photographic sculptural portraits an intriguing comment on identity.

In our contemporary society, photographs are the medium by which we assert, read and reproduce our identities. When individuals upload their carefully selected images on to websites and post photos on their Internet profiles, they create a public life and personality for themselves, be it true or false. Through these photos people are placed within stereotypes, judged, targeted by ad companies and others.

Osang in his use of photography for sculptural portraiture uses a medium which has become an expression of our social worth, our status. Osang’s work confronts this - he provides a photographic person, real in size, stance, style and looks: yet we will never understand them. All we create of each sculpture's identity will be a fabrication, a projection of our own experiences and prejudices.

You may think this understanding of Osang’s work utter rubbish. But that's all right as according to Osang, contemporary art means: 'a variety of misunderstandings', that become a 'way of communication'.

Indeed the exhibition’s title Deodorant Type is a pun on a cultural misunderstanding in itself: the failure of multi-national advertising agencies to sell deodorant in Korea due to, as Osang tells us, the majority of Asians not suffering from body odour. So go and become misunderstood and confused by Osang. If nothing else that life size horse is impressive.

Deoderant Type is on until 21 September 2008 at Manchester Art Gallery and is free of charge.
 

Link: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Massive-horse-invades-Manchester-Art-Gallery

PDF: Gwon Osang, Manchester Confidential, 7th July 2008

COMMENTARY: L.S Lowry, Selected Works

Published: MANCHESTER CONFIDENTIAL, 10th June 2008

Focus on Art: "Lowry: Is the Old Bugger Any Good?"

Artist: L S Lowry

Who's that?

You mean you live in the North and don't know? LS Lowry, born in 1887, a tall, suited, Lancashire man turned self taught artist has long been a household name. Often thought of as naive, his sentimental sketches and paintings depicting industrial working class landscapes and people brought him ridicule but also fame. He is now considered to be one of Britain's most popular and celebrated artists.

What and Where? Coming From the Mill, The Lowry
Date: 1930


Quintessentially Lowry?

Yes indeed. Here we have one of those industrial scenes the punters love so much. 'Coming from the Mill' depicts closing time at the factories, workers stream out of the gates on to the street and make their way home. The people are puppet like, no expression or individual characteristics bar the different colours of their clothes. Caps and red or dark green jackets throng the crowd. Their feet clad in oversized black boots. This should make the crowd seem like a mass, an organism of 'the people', yet it does not. In this painting, as with most of Lowry's, every figure seems to be alone. Lowry shows us, through his own experience of solitude, that there is emptiness in multitude.

Looking at 'Coming from the Mill' is like creating a story inside your head. Each individual can be taken, their life and activities constructed. In the right bottom corner a horse rears, throwing back the carriage driver in surprise. Two children stand side by side behind a fence, left out and observing others at play. While on the far left someone leans out of a window to talk to a mother below, a baby slung across her back. These characters turn into real people; they and the scene become symbolic of a nostalgic past that viewers remember knowing.

L S Lowry developed a very personal and stylised technique. The composition of 'Coming from the Mill' is linear and graphic, the oil paint thick and his colour palette limited. The buildings are flat, with simplistic white curtains and emotive, sombre ochre and red walls; their diluted and un-solid colour reflects the lack of money within. The buildings create a grid on the canvas and trap the wandering figures within the white roads. This painting is not one of freedom, but necessity and labour. The figures are hunched, head down and exhausted.

What and Where? Man with Red Eyes, The Lowry
Date 1938

Is it Lowry?

Well sort of. 'Man with Red Eyes' is a shocking and disturbing image, and a far cry from the heavily populated and distant figures in 'Coming from the Mill'. A man, worn and angry, stares directly out of the canvas, his large eyes burning with a sore red. The directness and raw emotion of his look arrests you.

Though a composite image, 'Man with Red Eyes' was started as a self-portrait. It was, as Lowry explained, him 'letting off steam'. For eight years Lowry had nursed his bed-ridden mother, simultaneously holding down a full time job and painting in the early hours of the morning. This painting he made right before her death, at a time when he felt frayed and on the brink of breaking. It's not Lowry, but the expression of his internal turmoil.

Lowry depicts this anonymous man with stark and grotesque detail. Small dark hairs protrude from his ears; the skin under his eyes is a heavy and dull grey. This man personifies not only Lowry's pain and grief at the time of its composition, but also that of the downtrodden worker, driven and laden by economic necessity. His brow is deeply furrowed, the unshaven stubble twinged with steel grey.

The man, hard and stern, also appears as though completely naked. He is bare and vulnerable in his anger. The red colour of his eyes, nose and scarf form a centre to the canvas. The scarf is tight as if slightly strangling him, while the overly large black cloak envelops him, overcomes his body, curving his shoulders, repressive. When asked about this painting, Lowry replied, "It frightens me".

Opinions…

On Lowry differ greatly. Many find his work sentimental, the language he speaks too simplistic. Looking at both paintings the subject does not feel real, but distanced. This is probably because Lowry did not depict real places or people. They are composite images, or as Lowry described them 'dreamscapes', created and imagined as he sat, tweed suited, in an armchair before his easel. Hence his rather ambiguous titles such as 'A Lancashire Town'. This makes his work surreal, but also at times frustrating and annoyingly innocent.

Yet people identify with them and come in their hordes to see them. The Royal Academy retrospective exhibition of his works in 1976 broke all records of attendance for a twentieth century artist. His mill scenes and portraits convey a uniquely English sentiment, very much of the industrial period. The landscapes are typical, full of shared associations. The boots and caps, smoke filled skylines and thronging crowds surging from the factories feel familiar.

Maybe the men do look like sticks, the whole painting somewhat cartoonish. Maybe, the industrial subject does not seem gritty enough, the white pavements too unbelievable. Maybe as comedian Harry Hill tells us, you could replicate it age 10. But maybe that's not the point.

L S Lowry was always aware that every painting he did was an extension of himself. He was a man drawn, not to document correctly what was in front of the work, but to show what he saw through himself, his feelings. His paintings were his indulgence, so why should they not be our indulgence too? Buy a poster for your living room, hallway and bathroom, as two loudly indecisive ladies were doing in the gift shop.

Both these works can be viewed in the Lowry, The Quays. 0870 1112020 www.thelowry.com

Link: http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/Culture/Architecture/Lowry-is-the-old-bugger-any-good

PDF: