INTERFACE

REVIEW

Strange Days and Some Flowers

Storey Gallery, Lancaster
13 July – 3 October

Reviewed by: Paul Cordwell »

Following a £3.5 million facelift, the nineteenth-century Storey Institute has been modernised and rebranded. Now a northwest hub of that fashionable oxymoron the creative industries, the vertical banner outside loudly announces 'Strange Days And Some Flowers', the first floor galleries' re-launch exhibition.

The Storey's website notes that the exhibition has no overarching theme or "curatorial thread". However, as if to distance itself from the necessarily prosaic operations of the offices beneath 'Strange Days...' concentrates on disrupting the normality of the quotidian; works displaying either wilfully disquieting spatial conundrums or contemporary examples of the fantastical.

Dominating the Gallery 1 space is Graham Hudson's architectural intervention Planning Your Exit For Best Value, a nine-metre high lattice work of painters' scaffolding – both a skeletal redrawing of the interior and a directionless maze – obstructing and framing paintings and free-standing sculptures. The construction's title and the impression that angry sub-contractors have recently downed tools suggest a certain suspicion of the antiseptic ground floor foyer and its adjacent bureaucratic buzz.

Matthew Houlding's layered accumulations of found surfaces – MDF sheets, plywood, cardboard, acrylic – result in sculptural assemblages which imply architects' models; echoes of the garden-shed tinkering of a DIY fanatic, nostalgic for the speculative model-making fantasies of youth. The utopian zeal of a Modernist dreamer has been hi-jacked by the opulent Minimalism of a wealthy nomad's show home.

Houlding's recent show at Ceri Hand's Liverpool gallery was one of the most effortlessly enjoyable exhibitions of 2009. Unfortunately here, the three Amaryllis works, suggestive of aircraft carriers or cruise-ships, are momentarily stranded in the surrounding chaos of this exhibition. A future solo showing for Houlding's more varied output might not be a bad idea.

One of an ongoing series of loose transcriptions of Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece, Robin Mason's large mixed media painting Sunday Reverie presents abutting rectangles of contradictory picture space; a boxy stage-set containing eroticised vegetable limbs and graphic supporting twigs. Grunewald's spiky S & M drama has been replaced by an insidious, sickly, cartoon sexualisation of pain.

Mason's two 30x45cm preparatory studies on paper lack the bombast and distancing slickness of Sunday Reverie, and yet the domestic scale and relative material scruffiness makes them much more appealing affairs.

The most interesting paintings are John Stark's small-scale works, opaque narratives with intimations of the gothic painted with the graphic clarity of a 1970s 'prog-rock' album cover. In the foreground of these glassy landscapes, members of an unspecified medieval sect tend their beehives. The hoods of their habits as erect as cartoon dunce hats, black holes for faces, the monks obsess over their apiaries, giving sheets of honeycomb the focused attention of the Illuminati unpicking sacred texts. All three works are indecipherable, blackly comic and thoroughly engaging. Thematically, one of the art world's perennial favourites is the dark underbelly of childhood whimsy. Dan Baldwin and Jock Mooney oblige in very different ways.

Dan Baldwin's paintings choreograph winged fairies, graphic linear skulls, toy bears, sweets, and picture-book cute animals with mannered splashes, daubs and dribbles of primary bright paint in a visual layering reminiscent of David Salle or Sigmar Polke. The relentless second-handness of the flat layering of graphic motifs and, by implication, of any 'authentic' experience seems to be the point. Or maybe not.

Jock Mooney's mass of gaudy pocket-sized figurines, torsos and body-parts congregate like a three-dimensional Hieronymus Bosch under the censorious gaze of Victoria and Albert's statues. The abject bestiary, painted in joyfully noxious colours, initially seems mass-manufactured. On closer inspection they prove to be the handmade output of an unhinged toy manufacturer – a severed chubby doll limb flashes painted fingernails; a scowling Mr Potato-head perches on skinny, pink-stockinged legs, its scalp dotted with inflamed pustules; whilst a surprised poodle with comically enlarged buttocks is frozen in the act of simultaneously vomiting and defecating.

A determination to employ scatological idiocy to undermine the ostentatious posturing of a civic statue may seem touchingly adolescent. Fortunately, Mooney's target seems to be society's casual infantilisation of desire, the sheer inventive oddness of the characters' deformed cuteness giving them a peculiarly resonant afterlife.

Of the free-standing figurative work Don Brown's restrained Yoko XXVII could not be more off on a tangent: a matt, anaemic white slender female form. The open pose suggests insouciant display disguising youthful nervousness, with the attractive purity of the surface and half life-sized scale making the body disturbingly vulnerable.

Wearing only pants and high wedge sandals, sporting the confidently severe haircut of an indie band front woman, Yoko's eyes are shielded by a curled fringe, presumably to reference the authority of 'the gaze'. A point rather over-emphasised by the shrouded white Yoko XVII, and the shiny black bronze version Yoko XIX which left the disturbing impression of a sleeping anorexic Batman.

Laura Ford's three vertical figurative constructions appear to be padded children's clothing, sagging sleeves replacing faces. Camouflaged eco-warrior Joseph Beuys Boy tooled up with rucksack and side bags, stuffed with Beuys' signature materials – fat, felt, twigs – just seems art-school flippant. Conversely, Boys Story II, a determined miniature arctic explorer straining to drag an overloaded supply sled piled with dismantled packing cases seems guileless and sweet.

Virtually filling Gallery 2 and even more physically elaborate than Hudson's scaffolding is the huge wooden shipping container staging Mika Rottenberg's video projection Tropical Breeze. Colonial abuses, sweat shop economics, the banalities of advertising and its complicity in the whole cycle should all add up to a depressing four minutes, but Rottenberg's lightness of touch and a dash of sarcastic surrealism makes the work uncomfortably amusing.

After such a lengthy period of closure, it is understandable that the Storey is keen to noisily reinstate itself as a visual arts venue. It will be interesting to see if it has the confidence to follow up 'Strange Days...' with a contrarily restrained and cohesive display.

Writer detail:
A manchester based artist involved with art in manchester for the last 15 years.

paulcordwell@hotmail.com

Venue detail:
Storey Gallery »
26 Sun Street, Lancaster LA1 1EW

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