- Venue
- Crocus Gallery
- Location
- East Midlands
“And remember, no matter where you go,
there you are.”
Confucius
So goes the back of the literature accompanying the Crocus Gallerys ‘The Self’ exhibition, currently on in Nottingham. And so I find myself outside the relatively new Crocus Gallery. I’ve never been here before, and I understand this exhibition is somewhat of a side-step by the commmunity-led project space into Nottinghams contemporary art scene.
Curated by Alice Thickett, a recent Fine Art Nottingham Trent graduate, the show relies heavily on her peers, with only one artist presented not stepping inside those gates. Unfortunately I find myself returning to the past degree show where I saw this work, but you know, I turned around and there I was, what can I do. But filtered through curation, how do they reflect that notoriously unreliable (for me) subject of ‘the self’.
Chloe Barretts monochrome figurative paintings find a better home (for me – don’t forget that) in a smaller gallery space than being impeded by larger expanses of gallery. They seem more commercially viable. Though I’m not sure what that means. Flirting with abstraction, the body is represented in fractures, inviting interpretations of a single body unravelling in a manner of multiple angles reminiscent of Cubism.
Ivana Stojcevskas deconstructive sculptural rebuilding of previous paintings presents the artist in creative turmoil. To assess, destroy, reassess, to rebuild, reiterates a struggle in motion. Here it is the creator who we see strain with themselves. A large empty frame hanging from the ceiling in front of the sculpture focuses this conflict further.
Clare Harris’ video attempts to “…release unspoken feelings…” through its sombre dreamlike approach. As the camera glides silently between the wrinkles wrought on aged fingers and a bare hospital bed one can only assume (for me, please don’t forget) the feelings intended are suicidally cathartic. The body is but a frail shell with which to contain such emotions.
Bogumila Matylda Czerepak is the artist I am unfamiliar within the show. And the rawness of her imagery and delivery has certainly not been hampered by an art school. Paintings and sculptures of corpus bodies explode internally with themselves. Motifs of puppetry and animals reappear in a sexual melange evoking (for me of course!) frustrated teenage expression of the erroneous limits of our own bodies.
George Darby and Martin Pearces monolithic black sculpture and accompanying ambient soundscape, in a separate space from the rest of the show, engulfs the viewer in a sensory experience. (For me) It is attempting a transcendental response. Part mystical, part reflective, I am reminded of the evolutionary signpost in Kubricks film ‘2001’. The black reflection of our selves mirrored into our own memories assisted by the hypnotising drones.
‘The Self’ is such a difficult, multifarious beast of an issue, that definite factors of the show are difficult to assertain. Certainly there is an emphasis on artists own motivations for creative expression. And a physicality with many of the works chosen here. But the links are kept quite open for interpretation. By you. Individually. Which (for me) makes a lot of sense.
