Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe 17 November – 16 February
Reviewed by: David Kennedy
'Love, Loss and Betrayal' is a mixed media show featuring five contemporary British artists: Robin MacFarlan, Colin Rose, Glynis Owen Jones, Emma Wigg and Néo Henry. The work ranges through traditional sculpture and printmaking, abstract colourfield painting, three-dimensional boxed assemblages and combinations of sculpted metal and colour transparencies. Robin MacFarlan shows eight Escher-like black and white prints which he calls "visual puns". Regeneration has a heart-shaped wrecking ball crashing through a brick wall towards the viewer, while End game shows a heart-shaped solitaire board. Colin Rose's two-part Loving and Laughter fills boxes with carnival ribbons and streamers with cut-out patterns and child-like painting to produce colourful hybrids of Pop Art and illustration. Emma Wigg describes her three paintings as "washes of bright happiness... to uplift and refresh the soul". However, her fields of purple adorned with gold leaf with their seemingly arbitrary titles like Scrumptious and Spells of Love seem out of place in a gallery being far too reminiscent of mood paintings sold in department stores.
Glynis Owen Jones' four sculptures make the most explicit response to the exhibition's theme. A roundel of two embracing lovers and a relief of two life-sized hands, one putting a ring on the other, have the curious effect of evoking both classical and Victorian church sculpture – and of begging the question why someone is making art like this in the twenty-first century. Jones' other two pieces are more satisfying in their echoes of the pre-classical. The most interesting works in the exhibition are undoubtedly Néo Henry's three wall-mounted metal pieces. Protection/No Protection, Hard As Ice and Mourning well seized are all simple shapes – square, ellipse and oval respectively – into which holes are varyingly roughly gashed and carefully cut. Each hole relates in shape to the overall form and is filled with an abstract colour transparency. The carefully cut hole of Mourning well seized and the jagged square of Protection/no protection suggest windows or apertures while the gash of Hard as ice suggests a torn opening. The three works together move disturbingly and tantalisingly between a sense of revealed insides and mysterious portals.
'Love, Loss and Betrayal' is an object lesson in the difficulties of mounting a themed show and could certainly be described as art unlikely to offend anyone. However, as the exhibition title might suggest, the recently opened 20-21 Visual Arts Centre and its energetic visual arts team are determined to combine fine art with community accessibility. In this context, they are off to a very promising start.
Writer detail:
DAVID KENNEDY
is a Sheffield-based writer and maker of artists' books.
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