ARTISTS TALKING

Outpost, Norwich
2 July – 21 August

Anglia Square stands within a vortex of fetid Feng shui channels just outside the historic heart of Norwich, draining a swirl of pushchairs, litter and shopping trolleys into the maelstrom of its concrete heart. Five of its empty shops are being temporarily used by Outpost as their contribution to the biennial, ‘Contemporary Art Norwich’. Outpost is making fruitful ties with comparable national and international organisations: in August five European galleries occupy the same shops. It is also a useful chance for Norfolk artists to see different models of artist-led spaces.

You have to step over a board put up to stop the roaming rabbit disappearing as you enter Royal Standard’s shop. Behind a wire screen, finches hop around the abandoned office. Sean Hawkridge poignantly marks that point in the process of entropy when the shop stops being a shop and begins becoming something else.

S1 Artspace presents an animation by Torsten Lauschmann. The far wall of the blacked-out shop is a shimmering screen of brown and cream stripes, part bar code and part waterfall. Popular with the Square’s visitors, it is beautiful, hypnotic and definitively ‘Modern Art’.

Darren Banks’ installation for Workplace has formal similarities to Coco Crampton’s Swing at Outpost. Both create a sense of volume through arrangements of parts within the architecture in a way suggestive of a theatrical set, whose objects imply an obscure use. A fantastical paradise spans the rear wall of Banks’ room; a fountain of disjointed domestic equipment spurts from a picnic table. In Outpost, a large tree makes a canopy above an arrangement of comely objects that straddle the borders of design and sculpture; I liked the hexagon constructed to encircle a beam like a great black wedding ring.

Jonty Lees’ confusing installation didn’t seem to tally with its listing. According to an invigilator who was visually implicated in the ensemble by sitting below an entwined pair of inner tubes, Lees immured himself in Moot’s shop, pasting newspaper over the windows. He then, apparently, disappeared – was the incomplete jigsaw a clue...?

For Bureau, Dave Griffiths displayed a collection of images of ‘cue-dot’ signals denoting reel-change, presented in various forms. The exhibition as an entirety suffered from a lack of pruning which diminished the symbolic impact of the bullet-like holes; but the toy guns that ‘shot’ a projection, and the hand-cranked reel concocted from projector parts that made a tiny light-show on the wall evoked the magic of early film-making.

Stephanie Douet

Stephanie Douet is an artist.