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Visual Art
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REVlEW ll Xlll l S DONNA WILSON: ESCAPE TO THE WOODS Lighthouse, Glasgow. until Sun 1 Mar 0000
lhe llne between art and crafts us too often blurred »- mostly by aspirational types who mistake the satlsfaction of making something by hand for a personal
s atement that can then be transferred to the viewer. Yet. in some cases. there's no line at all - as Ill the work of London—based Scots textile designer Donna Wilson, for Instance.
l ssentlally, Wilson makes dolls and purposely sickly-hued furniture. These Inhabit their own strange world of cartoonish archetypes. a Where the W/ld firings Are fairytale forest where tall. slim pines and twisting bare trunks form a klnd of entrance archway; where spotted palm trees with redvgloved fronds and puffy blue clouds hang still. These are all made of fabric —- hand-made. in fact, in Wilson's l.ondon studio — as are the creatures. WlllCl’l dangle amid the clothes- line canopy of leaves: cute, odd little bug-eyed woodland animals wrth elongated tales and robber mask stnpes across their eyes.
There's Canibdoll, who, as his narnetag tells us, eats other Canibdolls and us ‘always hungry'. Rudle Raccoon loves ‘rummaging through peoples (suc) pnvate possessions' and Albert (a cross between a dog and a woolly mitten) likes ”chicken chowmein' and dislikes ‘getling up too early'. There's a storybook series somewhere in this wonderful, welrd world of Wilson's, and we can surely forgive being directed downstairs to get purchasing our own pieces from her collection afterwards. After all. Canibdoll's gotta eat. (Davnd Pollock)
PREVIEW ‘3‘ 1'. i" #5 JONATHAN OWEN Doggerfisher, Edinburgh, Fri 6 Feb—Sat 28 Mar
Beyond their image of well-ordered conformity the great British suburbs have long been hotbeds of creativity, spawning restless youngsters who flee the semi-detached des-res Ieafiness to find the throbbing heart of the city. The London punk scene‘s prime movers. remember, hailed from Bromley. not the inner-city. So it is too with Jonathan Owen, whose new solo show explores the contrary comforts of suburban mores, subverting them en route. In one piece. a metal wine rack, that well-placed symbol of dinner party accoutrements. is rendered unusable by an array of carved wooden chains. A similar assault is rendered on an oh-so-tasteful Habitat coat-stand, messing up the clean-lined aspirational minimalism as it goes. Elsewhere, photographs have their central image of civic-minded statues methodically rubbed out ‘a la Joe Orton so all that‘s left is a plinth and a backdrop of a wall or trees in a park. All these actions are what Owen calls ‘acts of careful vandalism' inspired by ambiguous feelings about his own relationship with the Liverpool suburbs he grew up in.
‘lt‘s a love/hate thing,‘ Owen admits. ‘Ouite often people sneer at suburbia, but that‘s not how I see it. I love suburbia. I think it has lots of romantic potential. To be brought up there, there's always that romance and that yearning for elsewhere, where everything else seems exotic. Suburbia is a way of avoiding extremes.‘ He alludes to one of literature's greatest postwar fantasists, Billy Liar. ‘When he's in suburbia his imagination can flourish and he can create this world of his own, but if he got on the train to London he wouldn‘t have that.‘
This is Owen's second solo show at Doggerfisher, and he continues to explore Owen‘s own post-suburban pre-occupations on a grand scale.
‘A wine rack is the ultimate symbol of bourgeois aspiration,‘ he says. 'I suppose in my head I've got this fictional suburban man who‘s this cross between Reginald Perrin and Bob‘s wife in Rita, Sue and Bob Too. He‘s got this conjectural auto-biography, and I‘m constantly taking things from his house. But it‘s not an attack. It‘s part celebration, part love song.‘
(Neil Cooper)
REVlEW SClJl f’lllltl KARLA BLACK Mary Mary. Glasgow, until Sat 14 Feb 0..
The perfect storm of grease. dust and cotton wooi tonelled onto the floor and hanglng from ceiling tlles that forms the bulk of Karla Black", show r, something of an assault to eyes not used to sgualor. the natural urge t', to tidy everything up. Under these conditions. you either have to accept that there", some kind of Insane order here or else flee the scene
While Black's Intention can be guessed at. you really need to look at the catalogue of works to fully understand what the artist I‘, up to here. Memes such as ‘Surplus Is a GlVQfl (a smear of white and spotted orange oil stretr,hed into trackmarks across the floor of one gallery; and Strength ls an [ nd' Ia seree of pInk dust piles kicked and trampled in places. and smeared away by a long stnp of Sellotape) are made up of high street cosrnet:r,s. The out is lll()l‘,lllfl‘,‘;f and petroleum telly, the dust . descnbed as 'chalk dust' lit the llI‘:fillllf‘; could perhaps be the klnd used in a compact. Toilet paper and cottor. wool also find thelr way lnto other works.
Black describes her work as sculpture rather thah lfl',l51'lflil()“. but it's lfl their profoundly Site-speCiftc nature that these pieces suffer the contrast wrth the gallery's old wooden floors is perhaps not so strkzhg as if rntgttt be In a stark- whtte. antlseptlc modern room. Yet Pearl Blair's assertzorr that 'order ts the shape upon Wthh beauty depends~ s {/‘:’,t‘3‘3". [rt .erfed here. a sack of order creating somethlng pegrr'trtglv ill/I)", Dam Petr/r,
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