INTERFACE

REVIEW

Gareth Jones

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
15 April - 26 June

Reviewed by: Annabelle Shelton »

Gareth Jones currently has his first major solo show at the Milton Keynes Gallery (MKG). I share with Jones the experience of growing up in Milton Keynes in the 1970s and a curiosity of a Utopia. As the saying goes: "Wouldn't you like to live in Milton Keynes?" I never moved to Milton Keynes - it just grew around me and I became part of a social experiment.

Placed near to the entrance of the gallery is a small postcard devised by Jones of MK landmarks bearing a note to MKG director Anthony Spira: 'What time is this place?' Is this intended as a love letter to the Welfare State representing the utopian impression of an ideal city? For me the MK Utopia is like the dream of Icarus: heroic in its beginnings but somehow carried away with itself and fallen to a capitalist ideology of tall buildings. The original masterplan for Milton Keynes was not to have a building taller than the tallest tree.
Jones describes the show in his own words as a retrospective of new work, revisiting older works and reconfiguring them in the context of growing up in Milton Keynes.

On first impressions the exhibition is rather scant; very little is presented and acknowledged about Milton Keynes. In the corner of the Middle Gallery is Mirror Box, a construction that receives multiple reflections from around the room. Opposite, is a small neatly constructed polystyrene box crammed full of coloured card and sticky tape, remnants from a past activity, titled Harlequin Box. Turning 180 degrees I am faced with the harlequin himself morphed into a familiar shape for Milton Keynes: Sliced Cube is an assemblage of ready-cut luminous triangular mounting cards reformed into a simulacra of a Bernard Schottlander (1924 - 1999) sculpture. At this point Jones' narrative reveals itself in my mind like the kaleidoscopic mirror in the corner of the room. Growing up in Milton Keynes has strongly influenced his work and thought processes enabling him to conjure up arrangements of archiving and performance.

Moving on into the Cube Gallery a presentation of architects and planners are, like Jones, playing with fabrics of modern construction - jigsawing modular pieces into pioneering architecture. New City 2011 is an archive of digitised images orchestrated by Jones, referenced from a research period at the City Discovery Centre in Milton Keynes. This piece reveals Milton Keynes in a series of highly stylised photographs of architecture, interiors, landscape and construction selling itself as a dream. Photographs of new modernist estates emerge from the cornfields of the rolling English countryside. I am reminded of an estate where my parents took me on a viewing of a potential house-buy. I remember looking at the rather trendy cane furniture and shag pile carpet with desire - only to be greeted coincidently by the next slide of an interior of cane furniture and lush carpet. There is a sense of loss as we are reminded within the slide show of disassembled architecture; gone are the fluorescent pineapple building, the caterpillar walkway and the glass pyramid (the former Bletchley Leisure Centre). These popular buildings were the making of Milton Keynes and only serve as reminders placed on Facebook as memorable MK places.

The Long Gallery presents a conundrum, perhaps set out by the harlequin himself. Described by Jones as an installation, it holds a series of twelve small, framed advertisements for Gitanes cigarettes that featured in The Sunday Times colour supplements, collectively titled Twelve Men 2011. Taken in the 1970s, these images portray suave-looking men oozing the decadence of the age, wearing a small hooped earring and cigarette in the mouth, you can almost smell the old spice on each model. When growing up, a hooped earring signified that you were homosexual. Gareth Jones used these images that he had collected as a child to illustrate an edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) - a book of Faustian pacts and eternal youth. Jones visualises the room as a modern day ballroom; I am told you interact in relation to the work. If that is the case, light me a cigarette and let's talk about our collections and how they passed the time away in the new city of Milton Keynes.

Accompanying this show is a specially curated series of talks and films by Jones to go with the exhibition. Contact MK Gallery for further details.

Venue detail:
Milton Keynes Gallery »
900 Midsummer Boulevard, Central Milton Keynes MK9 3QA

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