Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes
13 December – 25 January
Reviewed by: Anna C Pike
'Inside Out: Investigating Drawing' is a speculation on the position of drawing within contemporary practice. It comprises work by eight selected artists who demonstrate an interest in drawing and the figurative. The exhibition implicitly recalls discussion around the status of drawing as verb or noun. The collective work is caught between notions of the ephemerality of drawing, with reference to process and its servitude to painting, and drawing that can exist independently as finished artwork. Much of the work is presented as sketchbook extracts – torn out pages, at times embellished with the lived-in qualities of coffee cup stains and crayon scribbles.
At the centre is the ambiguous work of Jamie Shovlin: a wall-mounted assemblage of framed sketchbook pages bearing precisely drawn images copied from an old first aid manual and belonging to alter-ego, Naomi Jelish. These appear as traces of real experience, memories perhaps, familiar and yet also removed. Posited against this work lies the fantastical and stylised illustrations by designer and artist Julie Verhoeven. Here we are seduced and estranged by a scattering of stylised figures, surreal and dangerously alluring, caught on the surface of a large four-part canvas.
Elsewhere we encounter notions of the finished artwork: Roxy Walsh's voluptuous pools of pure colour interspersed with intricately drawn detail, and Jack Duplock's macabre yet humorous apocalyptic mixed-media collages.
'Inside Out' reveals a medium previously associated with the unseen artistic process as an end in itself. Interestingly, whilst the work of a 'finished' aesthetic enriches our investigation, it is the 'found', sketchbook extract pieces, the images resting in corners of pages as investigations of gesture and process, which provide the most interest as independent pieces. In the white vastness, between the edge of the image and the beginning of the frame, is space for further consideration.
Writer detail:
Anna Pike
Venue detail:
Milton Keynes Gallery
900 Midsummer Boulevard, Central Milton Keynes MK9 3QA
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