ARTISTS TALKING

Southwell Artspace, Southwell, Nottinghamshire
15 September – 13 October 2007

The Moot brand, almost a jedi-like force, is strong in the current exhibition at Southwell Artspace.

Jonathon Velardi’s Fortune Teller easily assumes centre stage: a bright and mesmeric video work presented on four large screens, each split diagonally into numerous diamonds. The video undulates in a pattern across the diamonds: a kaleidoscope of gyrating women, bejewelled men, shiny cars and naked flesh that dissolve in and out of a pattern of colour and movement. Velardi uses the colour saturation and visual excess of many music videos as a palette of shots expounding everything profligate and extravagant about the hip hop ‘life’.

In a series of three paper and tape works by Mark Pearson we can recognise something of urban street life creeping into the gallery – short phrases and slogans that might litter shop fronts and market stalls, all handmade, all make-do. There is a harmony between the material and the text: a clumsiness and a functionality that is inherent to both the tape and the phrases. The Event Horizon, the fourth work by Pearson in the show, is a felt-tipped explosion of phrases, echoing Batman comics and sounds that don’t make it into the realm of language; gutteral utterances that are as uncontrollable as they are incomprehensible.

Dan Mort’s assemblage is a surreal and slightly uncomfortable sculpture. A wooden camel stands with one leg in a tin of dried paint, his neck curving up to the base of an anvil, a dead weight for a head, topped with a bonsai tree that has a wooden picture of a boat sailing wedged among the branches. There is a precariousness about this sculpture that shows a consideration of form and balance, implying a more traditional approach to sculpture than the materials first suggest.

Daniel Keeling’s Dulce et Decorum Est is a subtle work that steals the show. The presentation is at odds with the rest of the work, though the impact is no less potent for that. In a small frame at the back of the gallery hangs a text, which on first reading is somewhat meaningless – a Chris Morris-type composition of jibberish and nonsense. But meaning might be found amongst the nonsense: on closer inspection it is clear that Keeling’s text is a derivative of Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name. The effect of the transformation is a startling metaphor for the situation of the youth of today: I have heard stories and listened to documentaries, I have seen news of modern-day conflict, and I have read articles and books and poems and though I can understand the words, I still cannot really comprehend what it is like to live through, and experience, war.

Bianca Winter

Small independent publisher and fine art graduate based in the East Midlands.

bianca.weasel@gmail.com | www.bianca.org.uk

First published: a-n Magazine November 2007