- Venue
- Mostyn
- Location
- Wales
The Mostyn open returns after a five year hiatus during the galleries award winning and stylish renovation. So long ago was the last prize that we were still seduced by the boom, and now it’s bust and there is very little comfort to be found here. There is an overall feeling of concern and a myriad of pointed warnings about our complex world from the artists selected. The returning open has the feel of an open submission crammed with work, although this time the Mostyn has been far more successful in giving each work space and time to breathe. The 2011 Open presents new work and new talent in a curatorially cohesive but challenging collection of stimulating sculpture, installation, video, animation, photography and wall based works.
The Mostyn Open’s judges had a difficult decision and one that proved so difficult that they in fact awarded the prize to 5 different winners. So to not rock the boat I will do the same, without further ado here are my top 5:
Number 1, Ingrid Berthon-Moine presents V, a set of 15 photographs of men’s hairy chests. Hairy chests that Wales’ very own Tom Jones would be proud of. Berthon- Moine uses the nuances and variations in skin type, coverage of chest hair, shirt pattern and colour as her tools to create with subtlety an uneasy humour that plays on their obvious sexual connotation. She reframes the male cleavage carefully showing the thickness, colour and coverage of chest hair poking through and jutting out from beneath the shirt subverting and playing with male objectification.
Berthon-Moine unifies both masculinity and femininity in delightful, harmonious compositions giving these a seductive and beautiful tone that arrests our preconceptions and makes us cringe and laugh, an uneasy laugh. Berthon-Moine is no stranger to demystifying taboos in previous work smearing menstrual blood over the lips of models, questioning why we see it as dirty or unhygienic and something to be ashamed of.
Number 2, Helen Sear’s Sightline shows 6 grey-framed portrait photographs of female subjects in modern dress. Untraditionally each head is obscured and we are confronted by the cold, hard, lifeless stare of hand painted china birds. The birds will not allow us to meet the gaze of our young female sitters seen through the eye of a single camera lens. These decorative and mass-produced objects prevent us from consuming the beauty of the female. They keep our all-consuming eye at bay with each sitter’s clothes deceptive acting as camouflage as if mimicking feathers.
Sears questions whether the viewer is out in the open. Are we the ones exposed and does that make the young female a predator? By hiding the face behind the china bird, we become disorientated so we strain our heads to look again and again. It is difficult to get beyond this beady eye but each time we are placed in a conflict between what is hidden and what is visible, with Sears in full control, as creator, lens or god.
Sightline seems to directly reference Magritte’s Man in the Bowler Hat (1964). Magritte’s painting, currently on show at Tate Liverpool in The Pleasure Principle, consists of a businessman’s head and shoulders dressed in suit jacket and bowler hat with a dove hovering in front of his face. It also brings to mind John Baldessari’s Profile with Ear and Nose (2006). Sears conjures the surreal and the distance that can be created when we are asked to look behind what is being presented. Perhaps Sears shows us how unoriginal and faceless a society we have become?
Number 3, Lorraine Burrell’s Plug (2010) can initially be seen as a joke and a bit of fun. We are shown a pair of legs with a cardboard plug. In fact, like Sears, the work stands up and gains clarity through repeat viewings. The loop shows a humorous, pleasing struggle, repetitive but as it goes on the more and more difficult it becomes to watch. By de-humanising the human as a plug we become sympathetic to our blind frailty and stupidity, obsessively repeating ourselves in the modern world. Burrell as plug searches for the socket she has cut in her studio wall, she shuffles quirkily as if at once playful child then frustrated artist performing a routine akin to slapstick comedy but one drenched with repetitive failure.
Number 4, Nicky Coutts’ film Eastern uses locals from the suburbs of Tokyo to re-enact the final scene from celebrated Spaghetti Western director Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Despite Coutts having no budget for the film she has been successful in keeping the pace and sombre tone of Leone’s film which is all the more impressive as she has used thirty non-professional actors to play the part of Harmonica (Charles Bronson) and Frank (Henry Fonda). Each time an edit takes place the new actor takes over the role. Although this makes for a casual approach to continuity, Coutts’ replicates Leone’s borrowed original with consummate ease. Everything down to the improvised music by two local musicians having heard Ennio Morricone’s score is beautifully unsophisticated and handmade making for a breath of life into this classic but tired old film.
This final duel sequence takes on greater significance when we learn that visionary director Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone battled in court over what came first the Samurai films or the Western. Leone’s Fistful of Dollars is all but a scene-by-scene remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Leone and the West become the oppressor and Kurosawa the wronged man. Coutts manipulates Leone’s style and places the shoe on the other foot, playing with cultural interpretations and misinterpretations that represent uncomfortable truths about how we complacently view each other’s cultures.
Number 5, Miho Sato’s paintings Ball (2011) and Untitled (2010) are painted so delicately, fluidly and with such a limited palette they are almost not there. They are suspended moments, possibly from childhood memory, that require our careful consideration to complete them. Ball features a young girl in a powder blue dress playing with what seems to resemble two wonky circular yo-yos. Despite the quiet application of acrylic paint it is the play of light that pulls us to both these images and keeps us there, ultimately staying with us as we contend with the seemingly luminescent surface.
I was transfixed by the way Fern Thomas’ arms organically grew from the darkness to strike the bell that then pulls you sonically around in Bell in the Cell (2010). Thomas expertly captures silence and its depth by bringing into sharp focus the need for concentration, to wonder at the simple play of the light cast through a cell window.
Special mention must go to Geraint Evans for how he wrestles with our perception of nature and its representation in An Exhibit (2011). Evans cultivates a fine, meticulously painted construction of the natural world. A walrus (the only living species of the Odobenidae family) all tusks and flippers, sits on a what looks to be a hand carved rock surrounded by a busy team of technicians. They carefully tend to the toothy mammal with Henry the hoover, preparing the exhibit for perhaps the Natural History museum. Evans’ painting seem better than the actual experience of this scene and delivers a short jab of anxiety about the growing reduction in the animal kingdom. His work unnerves and unsettles questioning our increasing need to create false realities and with it our own man made, simulated natural world.
The Mostyn Open is back and the art calendar is richer for it. The considerable prize money will attract graduating students, emerging to mid-career and ‘big’ name artists. This year’s show reflects the selectors (Richard Wentworth, Karen MacKinnon and Anders Plass) as much as it does the current trends in contemporary art and holds together as well as a show of almost fifty artists can hope to. There is no clear theme evident here but the Mostyn Open’s selectors have created a uniquely stimulating collection and, particularly interesting for an open show, each work is allowed to speak for itself and have its own dialogue with the viewer. The presentation is sensitive making for a pertinent journey that gently, piece-by-piece combines to pose as many questions and challenges as it brings guilty laughter. There is succulent, poetic beauty here that leaves a sometimes shiny, yet at times viscous residue of restless, political anxiety and engagement with the global and local.
