ARTISTS TALKING

Scenery is a working collective and three of its members have joined forces with a further five artists to produce, under the curatorship of Simon Morrissey, ‘Picnic Area (dumb interior)’. Scenery began their operation in 2003 with projects that led them to London and Venice. As their name suggests their interest is in scenery and, more than that, in transposing it from object (background) to subject (event). The title ‘Picnic Area (dumb interior)’ draws lyrical and narrative associations, and in proposing a point of action, event or scene, it affirms its relevance as a group show. A picnic is a collective event, informal, democratic, temporal and makeshift.

What ‘Picnic Area (dumb interior)’ offers is a free association of language between two points of difference, between scene as event, and scene as seen (scenery), and it wastes no time in marking its territory. Richard Woods’ Logo No. 21 is a falsely laid floor that consumes the length and breadth of the gallery. Its compelling cartoon boldness marks out the terrain, and each of the other works (save one) either emerges from it or is surrounded by it. A second work, Come Here Dear by Roy Voss, wraps around three walls of the gallery enclosing the space further. In theatre, different scenes are often transposed within a single set, either through the addition, removal or movement of props. The viewer must be vigilant to these changes in order to follow the narrative. Similarly here the viewer is presented with a narrative that simultaneously proposes to be both interior and exterior. Woods’ work is one example. Its wooden slats are cabin-like while its bold colouration of greens and yellows are muddied and suggest the earthy outdoors. Roy Voss’s black and white photographs create a disjointed panorama but one that retains a cohesive scenic or epic sense across their mountain reach. Voss provokes game-play by inserting words into the landscape. An intimate and inviting phrase “come here dear” when doubled (through the duplication of the prints) becomes one of repeated solace: “come-come, here-here, dear-dear”.

Mandy Ure’s loosely figurative paintings succinctly transpose the deference of the interchanging interior and exterior of the show. The almost square paintings composed from tiny amorphous shapes hang on the walls turning Voss’s prints into wallpaper, and affirming the presence of the wall against the illusion of its disappearance. Three of the paintings hang across borders where the photographs butt, neatly covering their potentially awkward jarring and mismatched edges. Beyond this, through their surface, the paintings imbue material depicted within the photographs (such as rubble) with textual richness. A pair of part ready-made lamp stands further provokes the ‘dumb interior’ of the exhibition. Pecker enforces the singular sense of wordplay found elsewhere, while underneath on the ‘cabin’ floor six books sit on six Perspex plinths. A mix of bird and domestic gardening books have had vinyl lettering added to both their covers and the picture pages within. The text is fragmentary: “the radio on a duvet”; “Michelle and a car cover”. Text and image appear unrelated to outside eyes and with no points of comprehensible reference the work becomes somewhat hollow.

Central within this space (the gallery is divided into two) is Chris Mason’s Picnic Table. Constructed from galvanised steel tubes, it is both line drawing and scaffold. Dividing the gallery is Chris Barr’s masterful and multilayered four-piece panel work Untitled. The panels sit slightly ajar from each other, and the cracks between them form slender vistas. These tears unlock the second space that the work paradoxically creates by being there. Stable yet hopeless, an undisciplined adventure is a freestanding work by Brian Griffiths consisting of an open stepladder, an overcoat and a parrot. Legs splayed (the ladder), the figurative inference of the coat with parrot on shoulder mixes with the title to create a sense of childlike play where domestic objects become vehicles for visual ‘scenic’ play. Close by the temporal nature of ‘scene as event’ is enforced further within the makeshift quality of Mike Ricketts’ Maquettes. One work sits outside the frame: Brian Griffiths’ The Clown Situation. Its head up to the neck in sand, it succinctly encapsulates the all-consuming nature of the show.