Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
MAC Gallery, Birmingham
13 November – 2 January
Reviewed by: Mona Casey
‘Space’, previously hosted at Museo Barjola, is now sited in most of MAC’s exhibition and public interior. Comprising of six female artists, this exhibition examines their varying interpretations of, and responses to, the notion of space.
Lois Wallace explores atmospheric space through her photographic paintings. With ambient lighting as a source, she displays small canvases with titles such as Rest, Silence, Filter and Home. These titles imply how we should engage with these paintings, although we are presented with generic settings, which could be anywhere. For Isabel Cuadrado the space created through the deliberate action of perforated canvases is evocative of cosmological space and night skies. Her use of canvas, paint and fluorescent tubing is reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s ‘spatialisms’ of the 1940s and 1950s. Unlike Fontana’s quest to delve through the exterior of the picture plane to the surface of the gallery wall, Cuadrado’s pieces are contained boxes, and depth is created through the physicality of the illuminated light and its placement between the canvas and wood structures.
In Ruth Spencer’s paintings, which are devoid of human presence, we are presented with the issue of public environment as anonymous space, while Gema Ramos’ representational drawings of shoes portray the possibility of physical space, making us conscious of the very gap in which our bodies, and particularly our feet, inhabit.
Throughout this exhibition ‘space’ as a ubiquitous theme is presented for the most part as physical and illusory representations. At moments there does emerge some direct engagement or cross-over between the work and the environment, as in Maria G Gwynne’s sculptural installation Language and space: on the shelf where cut-outs, lighting and reflection are employed to create a new architectural impermanence on the gallery wall. Overall, however, this is a safe exhibition, presented in a traditional hang, which could have gone further in critically examining the issues and possibilities of this particular gallery space.
Writer detail:
Mona Casey is an artist and co-director of Colony in Birmingham.
monacasey@another.com |
www.colonygallery.co.uk
Venue detail:
mac
Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham B12 9QH
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