ARTISTS TALKING

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle
30 April - 3 July

‘After the Fact’ is a major show bringing together work by Thomas Demand, Emma Kay, Martin Vincent, Jamie Shovlin, Abigail Reynolds, Lucy Harrison and Matt O’Dell. Meticulously curated by Tullie House’s Fiona Venables, the exhibition sets out to present works that reflect upon the “subjectivity and partiality of historical record and received knowledge”.

Ironically, whilst recent contemporary touring shows often feel like they've travelled too far from their curatorial origins and lost something in translation, this exhibition about the failure of fact bends over backwards to elucidate itself. This is subtly acknowledged in the installation of Shovlin’s work where a bookshelf of supporting texts, sources and, significantly, a Dictionary of Lies also contains the excellent exhibition catalogue and notes, filed (where else?) under ‘Factual’.

The show features major photo works by Thomas Demand – something of a coup for Carlisle as his first major retrospective at MOMA in New York nears its end. Immaculate cardboard depictions of historically charged mundanity are presented as sumptuous photographs with the scale of nineteenth century History painting. Echoes also present in Abigail Reynold’s Mount Fear – envisionings of Manchester and Eindhoven crime figures as mountainous landscapes. Addressing the difficulty in reacting objectively when personal tragedies are distilled into the currency of statistics, numbers are transmuted into the traditional visual language of the Sublime. Whilst asserting that “meaning (is) diluted and subverted‹via the mass media”, the works here affirm the human amidst the data – through meticulous making, story telling, the reclamation of the lost. When I visited, the gallery assistant was busy showing a pensioner how to navigate Jamie Shovlin’s web-based (and notoriously spurious) Naomi V Jelish Archive. As a demonstration of the show’s highlighting of the mutability of fact, whilst simultaneously encouraging personal engagement with the construction of meaning, it could hardly be bettered.

west.walls@virgin.net

Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor is an artist and director of West Walls Studios, Carlisle.