- Venue
- Eastside Projects, Birmingham
- Location
- West Midlands
Samara Scott
- Silks
, Eastside Projects, Birmingham
16 May – 11 July 2015
Before entering the exhibition I am warned that the show contains pools of liquid and to watch my step, not to touch or disturb the surfaces – most are harmless, some are toxic and poisonous. This pre-brief causes the pools drilled into the gallery floor to take on an ominous aspect, a hushed reverence of Narcissus-like peering takes over. Eastside Projects has a history of drastically altering the fabric of its building, with adaptations and furniture designed by artists forming a kind of permanent collection. For a previous show by Mike Nelson a cast concrete platform was laid down across most of the floor surface and stayed for subsequent shows. It has now been returned to shiny poured concrete, only for these new, chaotic holes to be drilled.
The show consists of about twenty shallow pools in a scattered archipelago, all of the action taking place just below ground level. They have been filled with a multitude of substances; shampoo, milk, noodles, air freshener, Irn Bru, potatoes, confetti, soaps, aquarium gravel and ciabatta are just some of the 144 included on the list of materials that reads like a piece of concrete poetry. Clearly there is a joy and fascination in substance here, but there is a very specific aesthetic that forms from within the chaos, with each separate rockpool adhering to its own microclimatic rules, its set of materials a coherent world glimpsed through a liminal surface.
The treasures gleaming below the surface of some verge on the decadent; beads, joss-sticks, ribbons, ostrich feathers – in less skilled hands the treatment of these materials could spill over into the wistful and nostalgic but they are moderated by grottier, more urban inclusions; I spy onion rings and a laughing gas canister, like skimmings from the floor of a student flat. Some are more ghostly and slight: in one white shirts and trousers lie flattened in a pool of black ink. The pools take on a bodily presence, a grotesque corporeality, as though people smeared in powders and lotions have turned suddenly to sloppy puddles. The exhibition has a fragrance, of many mingled sweetnesses that add up to an overpowering and oppressive whole.
Something about the colourful liquidity and layered shapes reminds me of the proto-psychedelic 1940s public information films of Len Lye, made by direct painting onto the filmstrip. Also of his contemporary successor Jennifer West, who injects a countercultural tinge into her films through processes like skateboarding over filmstrips coated in hair dye, kool-aid and LSD. The substances used by Scott have a subversive aesthetic too, they point to activities such as soap making, hair and clothes dying which have long had a currency in subcultural circles. In this way chemicals can become a liberating agent, for adapting and altering the products of the straight world to fit an alternative agenda, a transformative potion for a conservative culture.
