Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno
19 May – 15 July
Reviewed by: Anthony Shapland
Llandudno has long faded past its Victorian best but constantly throws up surprises, and Oriel Mostyn is one of them. This year’s Open is refreshing: it has a light touch and the artists have space to do more than jostle for attention. Although there is no theme, there is an apparent identifiable strand of anthropomorphism and fables that crawl through the show. Blank faces of kittens, squirrels and birds crop up at regular intervals and the plastic, mutable qualities of multiple objects add to the ‘toon feel. This is a heightened Technicolour world where the gruesome meets the banal in one weird face-off; a sugared pill where the horrors and dissatisfactions of contemporary life are momentarily made attractive, or in Colin Lowe’s case, the unblinking taxidermied Hellraiser cat faces us, calmly oblivious of the darts stuck in its back.
There is some respite from this nightmarish animal world in works that find and define their own spaces amongst the chaos. Sean Edwards’ exquisitely crafted, but ultimately pointless and thankless, restoration and adaptation of detritus adds to the show’s oddness. For Pimp My Metro, Ruth Lliffe adapts her own car in homage to the TV show, a peculiarly British revamp – all cardboard and no sparkle. Sequins appear in an altogether different setting to the norm in Craig Fisher’s incident scenes where the gore has been carefully crafted. Silk-stitched blood spills out over a glitter outline of the deceased, or urine spills down a wall and across the floor as a satin puddle.
Reading the accompanying catalogue it is sometimes hard to ally the serious or obscure language of the artist, to the playfulness of their structures, betraying perhaps an anxiety that ‘funny’ equals ‘not-serious’ and therefore frivolous; but there is a dark edginess to this show that doesn’t need oblique references or obscurity to function. Nisha Duggal’s film combines art language and life. Set in a nightclub, the moves are repetitive, as is the beat, making a neat, natural dead-end loop; but the song lyrics attempt to shoehorn the words of a dissertation into the scansion. The rhetoric questioning of art-speak becomes all you can tune into. Any on-screen narrative is stultified by this voice that keeps banging on about art when the dancers just want to get on with hedonism. Duggal successfully highlights the gulf between one world and the other – theory and life – by uniting the two.
This is a cartoonish world of pets painted on rocks (Terra Mariah Fuller), self-portrait painting squirrels (Anton Goldenstein), and pink visceral bites out of white plinths (Kate Parrot), where serious incidents are treated with a contradictory technicolour dispensation (Michael Forbes). In this world, the dark monotone scenes depicted in the work of Sam Dargan, this year’s winner, appears even darker. These are not scenes of violence or sensationalised incident; these are more threatening, more desolate and hopelessly impotent: lower-middle-class office drones are depicted in extreme situations that seem apparently desperate. Executed on a small scale these paintings alienate the subject and highlight the futility of everyday life. Turning away from these images the rest of the gallery suddenly seems garishly inappropriate, like laughing at a funeral.
Writer detail:
Anthony Shapland
Venue detail:
Oriel Mostyn Gallery
12 Vaughan Street, Llandudno LL30 1AB
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