Borealis 1 Flowers East (July 2005)
Curator Cat Newton-Groves and promoter Alan J Smith have been clever
in designing an open submission show that gets some North East honed
artists into a prestigious London gallery. ‘Borealis 1’ is
anchored by North Easterner George Blacklock’s status as a Flowers
artist, giving him and his gallery a new regional context for exposure,
while the successful applicants -all of whom have lived and trained
in Newcastle or Sunderland- benefit from Blacklock’s establishment
in the London Gallery.
The downstairs of this split-level show mainly attends to painting. Blacklock’s Narrative Cover 12 Bars 2005 plays with layers of surface and gesture, here it is scuffed, there, colour differentials suggest skies of depth. Gloopy shapes add a loony-tune twist while, under silky glazes, the whole is subtly gridded on a scale that suggests domestic tiling rather than draughtsman’s paper. Nick Holmes makes poppy, printy canvases which re-tell art history in a lurid dialect, whacking Warholian squeegees of colour across Van Gogh’s once Yellow chair accompanied by words like “Alreet” and “Shite”. Perhaps Arthur McDonald could try some stand-up comedy to offload excess wit before going to the studio. He makes sloppy, jocular references to a feat once finely executed by Simon Linke in the early 90s by equating canvases with magazine covers.
Keith Roberts however hits my sublime-spot with almost cold monochromatic images of mountains (American Splendour 2004) or murky ponds (Etang 2004), sometimes scumbled into an obscure impasto which here and there breaks and falls away, exposing surprise glimpses of WOW!-pink underpainting. Drawing has its say here too in obsessively whispy, impossibly tiny lines of graphite tracery produced by the patient hands of Kate Gordon, while Sculptures by Lindi Tristram alleviate the central space in the form of cute, rockety homes, made mostly of retro wallpaper. Their cosily illuminated inner spaces are reaassuringly plastered with raffle tickets or beauty-mag bits ‘n’ boobs.
Approaching the staircase, an intriguing kind of photography is supplied by Karen Melvin who montages invasive characters into pictures of baroque table-top assemblages or corners of gardens -all in the childlike spirit of a Victorian photographer insisting on the existence of fairies. Meanwhile Claire Davies’ Interlace 2004 surrounds us with a 3 screen video installation which literally shows wool being pulled over our eyes. This process surely happens a lot in daily life but here it is at least made systematically clear, colourful, and even (dare I say it) pretty.
Having been tempted upstairs, everything on the next level gets more
intimate. Mike Golding has lovingly photographed stately-home rooms framed
and reflected in their own gorgeously ornate mirrors. Where the photographer’s
own reflection might inadvertently appear, Golding has meticulously removed
the evidence using digital technology. The results might seem matter-of-fact
but these magnetically mysterious scenarios celebrate photography’s
own glory as a mirror haunted by a human agency that has been and gone.
Ginny Reed also implements photography’s idiosyncratic charms
to allowing us to pry into the private world of person-to-person notes
hurriedly scribbled on scraps and receipts. Each floats on a dark
ground like a leaf on a pond as the apparently valueless objects take-on the
poignancy of desperate cries or debris from a disaster. Reed titles
the
project Past Notes 2003.
Finally, Francis Gomila’s A Place Called Oxmoor 2001 compels our attention for quite some time with hi-quality video pans around council estate interiors. Each features the tenant who passively appears during the 360 degree room-cruise as part portrait / part self-conscious guest in their own home. The wonderfully hypnotic, PoMo / classical music (familiar to Wong Kar Wai fans) conspires with the sedate technological authority of the camera’s crystal gaze to push any likelihood of sympathetic Realism a world away. Instead, the rooms and sitters unwittingly submit themselves to the imposition and intrusion of a self-consciously superior value-system.
© 2005 Paul O'Kane