www.list.co.uk/visualart
REVIEW SCULPTURE ARTHUR STEWARD & RICHARD JAMES MOAT: ELSEWHERE Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh, until Thu 13 May ●●●●●
There’s an aesthetic similarity between the austere, monochromatic works in this joint exhibition, but while Moat’s pieces are sleek, modernist and hint at the pre-fabricated, Steward’s sculptures take ugly, functional constructions and find a new purpose for them.
Moat had the icy polar wastes in mind while piecing together his sculptures and digital print images. The former are black-painted sheets of plywood, thickly coated in parts, lightly washed in others, onto which are set white neon letters in relief, while the latter are digital approximations of the same. Each word is separated into staccato, ice- crack syllables (‘PAN-CAKE-ICE’, ‘AUR-OR-A’, ‘NUN-A-TAK’), their lights the colour of ice glare but their backgrounds unnatural and foreboding.
Steward, meanwhile, transforms
street furniture into new and obscure forms. His ‘Not So Bleak’ is an aluminium lamppost, forcibly coiled like a snake at its base and pointing upwards at an angle, while ‘Stasis Nil’ is a pair of ugly concrete lamppost segments fitted together into a sleekly curved almost-cube. Like ‘Standing Straight’, a bronze lamppost cover on top of which is a thin wire holding a formless lump of the metal aloft, it’s the tension in Steward’s works of postmodern reclamation that most intrigues about this show. (David Pollock)
Visual Art
REVIEW SCULPTURE, DRAWING & PAINTING ALEX FROST: THE CONNOISSEURS Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 23 May ●●●●●
There’s much to sniff out in this multi-faceted collection of classical trash, made manifest here in multiple strands of work. At its centre is one of two title pieces, a flock of giant reproductions of noses that, in their pursuit for olfactory splendour, as with Gogol’s story of the same name, appear to have escaped their bodies and have thrived on the perfume of aesthetic excellence alone. Surrounding what look like amphibious sloths in
imperious repose on a frozen pool are two selections of what Frost dubs ‘Blind Drawings’. The first selection features large-scale portraits constructed by perforating the paper from behind. With each subject’s eyes closed, this really is a case of the blind leading the blind. Opposite are some similarly manoeuvred pixilated works adapted from knitting patterns. These flank a long counter of oven-baked sculptures based on the wrappings of space-age food substitutes. The brand names are unfamiliar, with Frost as much hunter-gatherer as prospective collector of self-styled retro-future detritus.
In the rooms off, Frost’s own silhouette is cast as an ornamental trophy. Even more off-limits is a peek-a-boo opening in an otherwise obscured window which, with its view of a large-scale image of veggie burger wrapping, is mouth-watering relish for the hardiest of curtain- twitching busy-bodies to savour.
Before all this, though, is ‘WiFi swimming pool mural (unfinished)’, a major new piece inspired by ‘outsider’ environments such as ‘The Watts’ Towers’ in Los Angeles, hand-built using discarded junk and found objects. The difference here is that every broken-up tile, stainless steel towel rail and plastic crocodile has been bought online in the virtual global village we all now inhabit. There’s much being said about personal identity in
relation to over-the-counter culture, as Frost crafts something unique out of mass-produced goods. One imagines some latter-day Caligula resting his laptop on his well-pleasured belly while he surfs some toga-party porn in-between excursions to ebay and amazon. As for the connoisseurs themselves, you can see why their well-pleasured nostrils might be permanently flared. (Neil Cooper)
REVIEW SCULPTURE & PAINTINGS VICTORIA MORTON Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, until Sun 2 May ●●●●●
In the basement of Inverleith House there’s a screening of Anne-Marie Copestake’s 1999 film on Victoria Morton to accompany this large exhibition of work by the artist. At one point in the film Morton asks all-female art/punk troupe Chicks on Speed about the relationship between their onstage pseudo pop star personas and their real lives. It’s a telling pointer of where Morton’s concerns lie because, a decade on, in many of the 47 pieces on show, the domestic and the purely aesthetic rub up against each other in a way that suggests striking a balance with the work/play matrix is far from easy in these allegedly have-it-all times. The sculptural works are particularly contrary. Battered chairs, metal pedal bins
and a beer tray mounted on a metal stand all become props on which to hang wilfully messy and increasingly busy paintings. The furniture itself is often painted in kindergarten primaries, further denuding it of grown-up responsibility. Elsewhere, images great and small come with titles like ‘Mummy, Daddy, Baby’ and ‘Pregnant Woman’, further accentuating the raging calm that tugs the show in so many directions. In the end Morton has created a body of work that’s both celebration and occasionally confused critique of the everyday mess we work, rest and play in.
Significantly, if not explicitly connected to their gallery work, Morton and Copestake are members of the band Muscles of Joy with six other women artists. They play Sneaky Pete’s on 14 April. Sounds like a riot. (Neil Cooper)
1–15 Apr 2010 THE LIST 89