Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Bury St Edmunds
13 March – 21 April
Reviewed by: Ivor Southwood
The annual ‘Platform’ exhibition aims to raise the professional profiles of arts graduates across East Anglia. I realise that artists cannot survive without financial means; nevertheless, perhaps unreasonably, I prefer work which interrogates the lifestyle/fashion/advertising industries, rather than aspiring to join them, as many of this show’s proficiently designed items seem to do. Art is often at its most exciting when it pursues dead ends or obstructs trade routes, instead of simply adding to the ongoing circulation of signs and funds between academia, businesses, and ‘culture-rich’ customers.
This is why the installation Airplay II (Give and Take)by Fran Crowe is of particular interest here, addressing as it does the connected topics of pollution and over-consumption. Her boxes containing specially harvested and packaged ‘fresh air’ can be interpreted, in the words of her accompanying booklet, as a comment on the “privatisation and commodification of the essential ingredients of life”. As well as the gallery display, the artist plans to spend a day selling cartons of air (with proceeds going to an asthma charity) at a nearby market stall situated opposite that ubiquitous purveyor of froth, Starbucks.
Elsewhere, Cab Weal’s collages of cut-out flower images pasted over blotches of paint leave areas of bare canvas exposed, creating an odd feeling of insecurity; and Adam McDonald’s large photographic prints depicting parts of an abandoned home (Kitchen, Night Shed and Fridge) somehow evoke a worn-out body or mislaid memory. Another photographer, Andrew Wakeling, presents two derelict industrial scenes, Broken Window and Boarded Up. More of his work is located offsite at the local NHS hospital, where I arrive, several lungfuls of ring-road fumes later, to view the pictures in a busy corridor. The three monochrome, ecclesiastically lit interiors of stone and brick seem almost wistful compared with the rickety environment of the hospital itself – another essential human space struggling to resist privatisation and commodification.
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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