- Location
CUBE Open Exhibition 2007
Artist-curators Hilary Jack and Paul Harfleet have done their bit in relaxing the often strained relationship between artists and architects by curating the Centre for the Urban Built Environments (CUBE) first open submissions exhibition.
The remit of the show is an exhibition from ‘practitioners working across media that explore the urban built environment’, a brief which is open enough for Jack and Harflleet to chose from over 250 entries, show their fine art roots and pretty much cover all angles on the thinly veiled theme of urban dystopia: the megalomania of architects; strained communications; urban(e) idiocy; the toxic mundane; mutual discomfort and paranoia; and the uncomfortable impotence of art all get an airing.
The strangely distancing immateriality of modern communications resonates in Michael J. Jones’s excellent 10cm by 8cm ‘Maquette For The Night’, an Ad Reinhardt billboard seen from a distance with it’s shy architectural conceit contrasting with Rich White’s leaning amendment to the actual gallery wall. A curiously effective pairing.
Urban(e) idiocy shows up with Margaret Diamond’s motorized pasty ‘Formula Driven No 5’ and its amusing accompanying explanatory text and in Simon Morse’s ‘We Do What We Do Best’, a pithy schematic diagram of a small town‘s mass custard pie fight. Violence is merely implied in the self-consciously and visually darker ’Room 4’, Tom Wightman’s 3 minute DVD of car parks illuminated by a CCTV-style dull neon green. This subtly nauseous toxicity finding sympathy in David Gledhill’s claustrophobic oil painting of a photographed cityscape ‘Found Image 1’ and the hyper-mundane light pollution in Robin Maurice’s digital prints ‘Nightscapes 1 and 2’.
A sequence of relaxingly avuncular monologues from iconic Modernists soundtrack Ben Cove’s soporific DVD of an apparently static record with spinning frame ‘Conversations Regarding The Future Of Architecture 1956’, whereas Fiona Merchant’s ‘Untitled (Drawing)’ and ‘Present Delivery (Drawing)’ attempt to conflate the functional aesthetics of packaging with Utopian modernism; watercolour images of protective packaging added to flattened/disassembled cardboard boxes. The built environment becomes so many layers of fiction and the operations of the institution literally framing the work comes overtly into question.
The wide remit of this open exhibition and the potentially fragile politics of its stagingshould have produced a curate’s egg of a show but it is to Harfleet and Jack’s considerable credit that this is an exhibition worth more than one visit.
