- Venue
- Surface Gallery
- Location
One of the best offerings from Surface Gallery this year, the tenth Surface Gallery International Open Show has presented a good body of work from both emerging and established artists. This year’s winner, Lisa Selby, led the charge in a very strong field with her work, Extend – Impend – Fortify. The suspended insulation foam cylinders lure the viewer with a comforting embrace, that ultimately will make you itch, encased in their patterned wooden jackets and hung from the ceiling by turned wooden poles they are like topsy-turvy standard lamps. The combination of these familiar yet unfamiliar aspects of the structures, with an undercurrent of the bespoke and material quality, leads you to try and unpick a function you feel they should have. However ultimately what function should they have other than that of demonstrating the lust for the alluring? They feel like a comment on the nature of consumerism and commodity through just being beautiful functionlessness. A clear and worthy winner in my eyes.
Mention must also go to Vishwa Shroff’s piece Dandy Crow Mocks Pigeon, Suzy Charlton’s Plank (Latex) and David McLeavy’s Curved Line With Orange.
Shroff’s Dandy Crow Mocks Pigeon was an interesting and though provoking work, is a little twee in some aspects of presentation and one dimensional in others. As a concept it worked well, causing the viewer to question perspectives both physical and metaphorical; for me an examination of the glass being half empty or half full and of society and roles within it. A window separates the two origami birds, but it’s impossible to tell on which side of the divide each is due to the window box like formation in the foreground and the foliage in the background; is it a house plant or some kind of garden shrub? This leads to questions of status and, when combined with the title, of narrative. A slight criticism would be the seeming concession to the idea of saleable wall art in that the work has a definite front and back from a physical perspective; one side is printed and the other left bare. This and the positioning of it so close to a wall, which added the somewhat distracting shadow, detracted slightly from what the work could have been for me.
Suzy Charlton’s work intrigued me and bemused me in equal measure. Two of her works were accepted into the show, Plank (Latex) and Planks (Brown). The former was in my eyes a very strong piece which fits beautifully with her mission statement of “Deconstructing preconceptions of what a painting ‘is'”. A timber, potentially painted and wrapped in latex, is propped against the wall of the gallery. The coruscating colours and swirling patterns engendered by the latex, in what can only be a random formation, changes with the viewer’s movement and the light conditions. It draws you with its hypnotic beauty; you can’t help but keep going back to it. Contrast that with Planks (Brown), a trio of fairly stagnant acrylic coated canvases and the only hint of the same artist’s involvement is the presentation. I sense that despite this she is defiantly one to watch of the Nottingham art scene.
Curved Line With Orange by David McLeavy was a classy piece of production. It leads the eye around the work well, in the same way as a classically produced painting whilst retaining a contemporary edge. It also had a definite reminiscence of recent Nottingham Trent Graduate, Claire Fuller’s work to it. Whether it entirely identified with his statement to the fullest is a question that may need answering in that if the “ides of the past”, I assume the manner in which the gaze is moved around the work, “still holds currency in a contemporary art environment”? I think it clearly does and I don’t think anyone could dispute that, but maybe I’m missing something.
Overall a well put together and engaging exhibition that has produced some excellent work, a worthy winner and showcased some very strong work. I can only say that I look forward with bated breath for the Lisa Selby solo show and hope that the standard of the 2013 International Open Show is as good, if not better.L
