The stars down to earth

Maslen and Mehra, ‘Salt Creek Death Valley’, photographed sculpture, re-used advertising displays from the Underground, 194.5x135x10cm, 2005.
Courtesy: Galerie Caprice Horn Berlin.
edition of 5

REVIEW

The Nunnery, Bow Arts Trust, London
24 June – 22 July

Reviewed by: Vanessa Desclaux

Curating an exhibition is always dependent on constraints whether they are defined by time, space or budget. In the case of ‘The stars down to earth’, the curatorial exercise consisted of selecting works made by artists from Bow Arts Trust studios participating in this year’s open submission. The exercise was brilliantly executed by Andrew Hunt. ‘The stars down to earth’ proposed modest curatorial intentions but surely created a display that linked the different works together with subtlety and intelligence. By looking up for multiple ways of interpreting each work, it opened up various perspectives that the exhibition invited the visitor to explore.

The title of the exhibition brought back to my memory the modern tale written by Antoine de Saint Exupery untitled The Little Prince¹, whose famous cover shows a blond-haired boy standing on a small deserted planet standing out against a starry sky. In the tradition of the philosophical tale, The Little Prince uses the narrative structure of a children’s story to introduce thoughts about love, death, morals or politics. This gap between form and content that defines the philosophical tale is also present in some of the works in the exhibition.

The surfaces temporarily hide the artists’ real intention from the visitor. Danny Pockets’ poetic photographs of a blue plastic bag blown by the wind trap you into reading quotes by Karl Marx. Looking more closely at Gordon Cheung’s dream paintings made with fluorescent colours we distinguish the pages of the Financial Times. In Daniel Lehan’s diary pages it is the simplicity of the presentation – a diary page where he wrote few lines describing what happened to him on the day and typed at the bottom of the same page his astrological prediction on that day – that could make you miss the point. His work stresses how the irrational has interfered with reality by using its own language, or as Roland Barthes pointed out in his Mythologies (1957), how astrology has become a “pure institution of reality”.

Nevertheless, the exhibition opens to a dreamlike world often on the edge of being frightening and alienating as in Maslen and Mehra’s Salt Creek Death Valley, a photograph of a ghostlike figure, floating in an uninhabited and beautiful mountain landscape, shown in a re-used advertising display. Many of the works in the exhibition seem to express through different mediums a fascination for the spectacle offered by nature. This theatricality is staged by the artwork through its mode of display in Brignell and Raimes’ Chamber Works where the visitor discovers moving images of intense fire by looking into a small window. Yet, Alan Bond’s Planetarium draws on the impossibility for the artwork to compete with the natural experience and proposes a very poetic architectural installation made of old doors, found material and Christmas lights.

Giles Corby’s floor sculpture Underworld transports the visitor into a futuristic landscape that inspires chaos and insecurity, with the feeling that the sky could fall on our heads and the earth crack under our feet to swallow us alive. The works in ‘The stars down to earth’ situate themselves at the limit where escapism slips into anxiety. This ambiguity takes a poetic form in the cloud paintings of Dawn Shorten: contemplative objects for dreamers, clouds also darken the sky to announce a storm or a heavy rain.

¹ The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, 1943, edited by Reynal and Hitchcock, New York.

INTERFACE

REVIEW

The stars down to earth

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