- Venue
- Exit Here
- Location
- East Midlands
Jackinabox, the first exhibition curated and staged by Nottingham-based artist group Exit Here, presents pieces by five artists whose practices – though described in the exhibition text as being “unrelated” – adopt a shared aesthetic through which the familiar and everyday are represented, subverted and re-imagined.
Matthew Mark Roberts’ two works, Bucking Bronco and Judd’s Jaw, portray a man whose artistic endeavours lead him to the garden shed; his fragile assemblages utilising the physical qualities of spades, saws and other such items. Roberts chooses to ignore the intended uses and efficacy of these things as tools, in favour of more enigmatic and peculiar manipulative processes, through which a saw is bent to near-breaking point and held in place by a clamp, creating a free-standing form that is both elegantly contorted and worryingly tense, and, in Bucking Bronco, a spade and a broom are combined to form a supportive arm which holds a ceramic pot above the ground precariously; the weight of the pot counterbalancing the heaviest point of the spade and thus maintaining the equilibrium of the structure.
In the latter, all items have been coated in uniform blue gloss paint- an action that is perhaps intended as a unifying and transformative gesture through which the work, fragmentary in nature, finds a new intended purpose for its mundane constituent parts, becoming, as they do, a single art object. Roberts’ pseudo-scientific investigations – in which laws of physics are illustrated through risky homemade experiments, like a school science fair project that explodes unexpectedly scarring those who stood too near – exude a kind of boyish curiosity; his compositions the result of extensive periods of navel gazing.
Matthew James Kay, represented by three works in Jackinabox, also pursues an artistic practice focused on the adaptation of everyday objects. In Spot Painting, a baking tray, supported by a modified tripod, is made into a kind of impromptu canvas on to which balls of coloured wool are arranged – a composition with pop-art pretensions – akin to Damien Hirst’s own series of spot paintings.
His two other works, Untitled (Calm in the Storm) and Untitled (Sinking Ship), take a different, more imaginative, narrative-driven approach to transgressive alteration of the mundane. In the first of these two works, “Calm in the Storm”, a blue chair with shortened legs loiters lopsided and stunted, upon which stands a defiantly vertical white wooden rod. The piece has a rudimentary aesthetic appeal, with the white and blue of the wood echoed by the ruffled sheet on to which the form stands; the seat being the boat, the wooden staff its ineffectual mast and the sheet taking the role of the sea. Paradoxically, the seamlessness with which the chair and the “mast” are appended to one another makes their partnership all the more natural, and because of this, all the more incongruous. I found myself simultaneously believing and not believing that the object before me was indeed a ship.
Kay’s work has a visual simplicity that not only makes it very attractive to behold, but also rewarding conceptually, for without being overly didactic he manages to arouse a multitude of thoughts and feelings. His transmutation of the familiar into props of imaginative story telling, for me, evokes childhood games. In particular, a child’s ability to project fantastical narratives on to banal surroundings; arranged sofa cushions becoming a castle, and in the case of “Sinking Ship” and “Calm in the Storm”, pieces of furniture becoming a boat, the bedroom floor a boundless sea. This is perhaps why it is easy to imagine oneself upon this boat but not easy to reject adult doubt; we are temporarily looking at this former furniture through the eyes of a child at play, and, in having grown up our ability to suspend disbelief is a more laboured achievement than when we were children. Both Matthew James Kay and Matthew Mark Roberts seem determined, through their practices, to reclaim childlike inquisitiveness for their adult selves, and compel their audiences to linger in momentary regressive relief.
Permeating the exhibition space with pockets of animal activity, as part of his ongoing Freianlage series, Andrew Bracey’s small plastic forms – bears and bats – are to be found scaling window frames and other hard to reach places. By placing these diminutive, and at times transparent, creatures in places they might be expected to populate if alive, Bracey anthropomorphises his inanimate pets, though in situating them in impossibly extravagant locations, as he does with a horde of bears who have scaled the heights of the ceiling-hung strip lights, subverts that very naturalism. On the floor plan, Bracey’s exhibition contribution is limited to his two small drawings of bat and bear silhouettes; ‘red herrings’ perhaps, designed to mock the viewer who has missed the artists’ hidden menagerie.
Margaret Diamond’s trio of motorised ‘steak bakes’, Formula #5 (Greggs), takes a less subtle route than Jackinabox’s other works, driven by an overtly socio-political stance, brashly satirising consumer culture and the homogenisation of our cities. Each battery powered pasty-vehicle, when activated, pirouettes and meanders chaotically, clattering against the boundaries of Diamond’s table top arena and fellow ‘motorists’ in a mindless stupor.
The last of the show’s works sees Edward Payne’s Sod House, stacked paper nets of flat-pack living spaces, and a wall-hung sculpture -the puzzlingly titled Wind Up Life Force. Ten miniscule model figurines, of the architectural maquette variety, positioned upon two protractors, depict an impossibly surreal balancing act in which some (including a replica of the Queen) stand upside down, each as if the reflection of an identical character directly above them. One figure has the burden of supporting the weight of five others whilst balanced on his head. The two protractors and ten figures are themselves placed on top of a slightly larger wooden model of a common house chair. This convoluted composition offers few clues, but when seen in relation to Sod House can perhaps be said to critique the western culture of material aspiration, in particular the current public penchant for the (excessive) over-designing of every aspect of living. Although, the distorted scale and fantastical composition of Wind Up Life Force does exude a playfulness that somewhat belies overly sombre interpretation.
The dichotomy of humour and seriousness, so intrinsic to each of the practices on parade in Jackinabox, and the shared aesthetic of lo-fi intervention/installation seem consistent with a trend in current contemporary art practice in which the artist takes a elementary approach to exploring their environments, by actually adapting the material language of their everyday lives for poetic, political and emotional appraisal.
Maybe Jackinabox should be read as Exit Here’s statement of intent as a group, for although the work exhibited is that of external practitioners, there is a definite sense of cohesive purpose and belief in the show, suggesting that Exit Here’s own direction as artists lies on similar ground to that of Roberts, Payne et al. Exit Here have undoubtedly announced their public arrival in an arts scene ever expanding and developing – with fellow independent groups such as Tether and (the now relatively senior citizens of) Stand Assembly pursuing a growing number of projects locally and throughout the country – with an exhibition that adds weight to the argument that, as much as Nottingham needs large-scale government funded centres such as Nottingham Contemporary, the future of the city as a site of cultural interest lies as much in the hands of fringe groups, such as Exit Here, and their projects.
