- Venue
- Leeds Met Gallery
- Location
- Yorkshire
“Familiar space provides an environment which has unexpected edges.”
The Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time is central to Unheimlich, a group show running until 17 May at Leeds Met Gallery. The work aims to be unsettling, with objects encountered that render it difficult to remain at ease. As you initially enter the gallery Steve Bishop’s Suspension of Disbelief tries its best to support this statement. A fox impaled by four neon lights the work is certainly confrontational.
The brash masculinity of Bishop’s work is undermined by the presence of Rachel Goodyear’s tautly subtle Girl with Foxes. This series of small drawings have a misleadingly inconsequential narrative that slowly unravels the more time you spend with the work. The drawings are impeccably restrained, lulling the viewer into a false sense of security before revealing an underlying terror.
Elsewhere interest wanes. The clinical white cube that is Leeds Met Gallery offers too obvious an environment for the purported concept. An air of familiarity seeps through much of the work and to even hope to ‘renegotiate our perceptions of the space’ is almost ludicrous. Pete Smith’s animatronic mannequins ask the same questions as Jean Tinguely and have Beckett leanings that housed elsewhere might have offered something else. Yet in this space come across as slightly ridiculous gothic set-pieces.
I found it irritating how individual pieces were undermined by one another. When two works with sound create a confusing cacophony of noise, it is a problem. This is a shame because there is strength to be found in some of the work. Clara Ursitti’s E.C.C.O is a strange bombardment of flash shots of fish and otters. The moments of blankness, hopefully intentional, open the work up to juddery contemplativeness. Ursitti does not go for instant thrills and, as with Goodyear, seems to understand the more that is omitted the more our senses are engineered to test our perceptions.
