INTERFACE

REVIEW

Borealis 1

Flowers East, London
8 July – 8 August

Reviewed by: Paul O Kane »

Curator Cat Newton-Groves and promoter Alan J Smith have cleverly designed an open submission show that gets artists from the north east of England into a prestigious London space. ‘Borealis 1’ is anchored by north easterner George Blacklock’s status as a Flowers East artist, giving him and his gallery a new regional context and exposure. Meanwhile, the successful applicants, who have all trained in Newcastle or Sunderland, benefit from Blacklock’s establishment in the London gallery.

The downstairs of this split-level show mainly attends to painting. Blacklock’s Narrative Cover 12 Bars plays with layers of surface and gesture. Here it is scuffed, there colourful differentials suggest skies of depth. Gloopy shapes add a Looney Tunes twist, while under silky glazes the whole is subtly gridded on a scale that suggests domestic tiling rather than draughtsman’s paper. Nick Holmes makes poppy, printy canvases which retell art history in a lurid dialect, whacking Warholian squeegees of colour across Van Gogh’s once yellow chair, accompanied by words like ‘Alreet’ and ‘Shite’. Perhaps Arthur McDonald could try some stand-up comedy to offload excessive wit before going to the studio. He makes sloppy, jocular references to a feat once finely executed by Simon Linke in the early 1990s by equating canvases with magazine covers.

Keith Roberts, however, hits my sublime spot with American Splendour, almost cold, monochromatic images of mountains, or the murky ponds of Etang, occasionally scumbled into an obscure impasto which breaks and flakes away here and there, exposing surprise glimpses of wow-pink under-painting.

Drawing has its say here too, in obsessively wispy, impossibly tiny lines of graphite tracery produced by the patient hand of Kate Gordon; while sculptures by Lindi Tristram alleviate the central space in the form of cute, rocket-like homes made of retro wallpaper. Their cosily illuminated inner spaces are reassuringly plastered with raffle tickets or beauty mag bits ‘n’ boobs.

Karen Melvin’s intriguing photography montages invasive characters into pictures of baroque table-top assemblages or corners of gardens – all in the childlike spirit of the Victorian photographer who insists on the existence of fairies. Nearby, Claire Davies’ Interlace surrounds us with a three-screen video installation which literally shows wool being pulled over eyes. This process surely happens a lot in our daily lives, but at least here it is made systematically clear, colourful, and even (dare I say it?) pretty.

Everything upstairs in the space gets more intimate. Mike Golding has lovingly photographed stately home rooms framed and reflected in their own gorgeously ornate mirrors. Where the photographer’s own reflection might inadvertently appear, Golding has meticulously removed the evidence using digital technology. The results might seem matter-of-fact, but these magnetically mysterious scenarios celebrate photography’s own stately glory as a mirror haunted by a human agency that has been and gone. Ginny Reed also implements photography’s idiosyncratic charms allowing us to pry into person-to-person notes scribbled on scraps and receipts. Each floats on a dark ground like a leaf on a pond as the apparently valueless objects take on the poignancy of desperate cries or debris from a disaster.

Finally, Francis Gomila’s A Place Called Oxmoor compels our attention for quite some time with an endlessly circling, high-quality video that pans around council estate interiors. Each features the tenant who passively appears during a 360 degree room cruise as part portrait, part self-conscious guest in their own home. The wonderfully hypnotic PoMo/ classical music (familiar to fans of Wong Kar Wai) conspires with the sedate technological authority of the camera’s crystal gaze to push any likelihood of Realism a world away. Instead, the rooms and sitters unwittingly submit themselves to the imposition of a self-consciously superior value system.

Venue detail:
Flowers »
82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP

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