ARTISTS TALKING

Senses, sensibilities and desires are confronted by a large range of work at ArtSway’s Open Exhibition this year, which is, for the first time, unrestricted by theme. Appealing to the eye, the mind, the mouth, the ears and the fingers, works jostle for attention and recognition, though those that hold it are not necessarily those that shout the loudest.

Playing to a society of sophisticated consumers, it is no surprise that several of the artists in this exhibition explore and subvert the impulses of desire and satiation. Isha Bøhling’s small squares of wax-covered wood have smooth, perfect front-surfaces that are instantly appealing, amplified by the contrast of jewel-like candy patterns with squares of perfect creamy whiteness, that all at once ask to be owned, eaten and touched. The contrasting side-views of layered wood and messy glue, however, betray our societal emphasis on surfaces and the polished desirable gleam of bright objects. Gemma Angel’s neon sign advertises seedy Sexy Food, conflating two desires into one impulse to consume and consummate, and Jayne Eagle’s digital print pussyfoot represents a crumpled stiletto shoe which appears to be made of a translucent membrane of skin or lace, layering Freudian and Marxist connotations of fetishism with bodily fragility.

It is not only shoppers who are consumers however, and two artists in particular make humorous and ironic references to our ability to pick and mix philosophy, art or religion to use as if they were sweets from a shop. Neil Pavey’s painting Instructions for Living no. 10 employs a media-savvy aesthetic to float liquorice allsorts on a pink and blue visual field with instructions from the Qur’an, the Torah and the Bible, underwritten by an advertiser’s tag-line that explains: “Having the ability to choose is great but sometimes it’s good to let someone tell you what to do.” One’s desire to be given instructions can be sated by any of these pick ‘n’ mix texts, that can be rendered as appealing by the media as the latest must-have. Shane Bradford’s excellently executed Lolly-pop Philosophies: Miracles plays with similar ideas: models of religious figures performing miracles have been dipped in white gloss paint using lolly sticks complete with corporate ‘Miracles’ logo and customary lolly stick jokes. One can just make out “How many virgins does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Food for thought indeed.

Running against this set of appealing and desirable works, however, is another contrasting, yet related set of works, whose focus is not consuming and desiring objects, but of empty, quiet non-spaces, affected by the ghosts of human traces. Penny Klepuszewska’s series of photographs End are panoramic views of empty living spaces of those who have died alone with no next of kin, left to be cleared by local councils. In these empty spaces, a single photograph or walking stick is imbued with a powerful presence. Dave Ellis’s work, Living Space, is a film of anonymous details of an empty living space, which seems to search, through surveillance, for evidence of human traces in the atmosphere. Traces also make their presence felt in Claire Barber’s beautiful photographs taken in Kyoto, where tiny silk threads recall the light footsteps of tiny insects, and fragile red pins make a trail on deserted stone steps, and in Laura Mousavi Zadeh’s paintings of Iran, where American cinema seems to have left its traces on a country that it tries so hard to distance itself from. The questions found in the contrast between the works that attract us with their glossy desirable object-sheen, and those quieter works that hold us with almost imperceptible traces, offer just one glimpse into this peep show of new artists and new work.