Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery, Bury St. Edmunds
28 March – 6 May
Reviewed by: Ivor Southwood
The sixth ‘Platform’ exhibition at Bury St Edmunds Gallery promotes the work of recent visual arts graduates from across East Anglia. Being involved in such a potentially career-building event means that the artists are perhaps expected to convey commercial usability (in industries such as photography, architecture and interior design) as well aesthetic or social ideas in their work. It is a tricky balance to strike, and the most stimulating pieces here are those that illustrate the impossibility of any pure space or language in our hyper-mediated, transient culture. For instance, in As I See It, Alexander Dias presents two large photographic prints (one taking as its subject the Suffolk landscape, the other Los Angeles) made up of multiple images, creating frames in which everything exists at once but nothing seems quite real. In the LA print, people and cars float between buildings and advertising slogans – ‘Fame Market’, ‘Point Zero’, ‘Neverland’ – resulting in a virtual scene from which all perspective has been eliminated.
David Earl’s Faster Than Fairies is a series of photographs taken from a moving train. Captured as they rush past, the material props of tracks, wires and countryside dissolve and merge into horizontal shades of colour and streams of consciousness, like abstract paintings. From fluidity to fixity, in his second work, This Other Eden, Earl uses ‘degree confluence points’ of latitude and longitude across the UK to select his material, applying tourist brochure slickness to arbitrary locations that happen to stand upon sites of intersection. By this method, a pillbox, a factory building and a concrete sea defence barrier are revealed as some of the great unintentional artworks of our time.
The nebulous silver-grey outlines of Shed Series by Sarah Ross are tentative mental spaces, and the twisted figures and parallel worlds of Richard Dinnis’ Pythonesque animation (Sentimental Cat Poetry, with Michael Page) and drawings (What Do Ducks Eat?) demonstrate how the contortions of class, manners and sexuality are like another form of acquired and restricting language. His characters are caught in the act of liberating themselves, breaking the rules and succumbing to hysteria.
What these works show is the textual overload of our dyslexic landscape, the Circus Space (as in Laura Miller’s architectural collage, included here) of impenetrable signs that we routinely encounter and inhabit. When the structure of this spatial language is disturbed, we are forced to ask: what is reality, and can we find ourselves in it? It is important that there is still a ‘place’ for art that interrupts rather than transmits the usual messages, and brings out the underlying strangeness of everyday life. We need to displace ourselves and unlearn the dominant language to begin to see the world as it really is.
Writer detail:
Ivor Southwood
ivor.southwood@btinternet.com |
Venue detail:
Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery
The Market Cross, Cornhill, Bury St Edmunds IP33 1BT
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