- Venue
- Sidney Cooper Gallery
- Location
- South East England
Red List is the latest show to be held at the Sidney Cooper Gallery. The Red List is also a record of all species that are threatened with extinction. So upon entering the space the audience is presented with a dilemma. Should they enjoy the art for its own sake or should they be moved to do more and think more about the effect human endeavour has on the planet. It is of course a very modern dilemma, where tragedy becomes spectacle and the only response is open-mouthed voyeurism rather than swift intervention. This is a response made all the more easy by distance, a physical distance sanctioned by the camera and the television screen. The viewer is implicated, but never culpable.
For there is a lot to enjoy at Red List, surprisingly not a paean to death and destruction, but a celebration of nature, it just happens that this nature is endangered or now no longer exists. Equally, it is a reminder of the ways we used to consume knowledge, a historical taxonomy not to be found on the internet but in museums for adults and children alike. Indeed there are echoes of the Victorian museum in the work of Richard Barnes, as he captures behind the scenes images at various American institutions. In Smithsonian Ostrich a large bird is enclosed inside a wooden crate, its long neck strapped down and pulled towards the floor. The bird is neither in a natural or constructed habitat and it is this in between state that highlights mans’ brutality, a desire to separate and study no matter what the cost may be. In Man with Buffalo, a balding man in jeans carefully hoovers around a stuffed buffalo. Here Barnes creates humour through incongruity. Bald man and buffalo, death and life, not so much survival of the fittest but all existence as random fluke.
There is also something slightly comic about the work of Paul Hazleton. Small moths becomes Mother Moth a supersize predator and a large rhino, Woolly Rhino with Rhino Beetle is reduced to dog-sized proportions. Viewers might feel intimidated if each piece wasn’t rendered in cotton wool or bits of fur coat. Instead they look on and smile.
In contrast the work of Steve Melton is concrete and considered; there is no room for laughs here. For Marvels of the Universe, Melton displays a group of small animals and reptiles encased in resin. What at first appears to be a small museum collection are animals that the artist has gathered from local pet shops. Each animal had died in transit; pet shop as mausoleum. And then there is Bee Museum, possibly the most exquisite piece in the show. A tripartite tower consisting of thirty-six glass spheres, each containing a honeybee, the exactitude of the sculpture echoing the intricacies of a beehive. It is this work that is most indicative of the Red List as a whole; both are delicate and instructive, both bridging the gap between art and science.
