INTERFACE

REVIEW

American Mountains

Auto Italia South East, London
29 April - 16 May

Reviewed by: Fay Nicolson »

Within a sparse former car showroom a blue and orange carpet sits on white linoleum as elsewhere detritus is piled beside a pair of speakers. A resonating hum alludes to activity behind this disused commercial façade, whilst two small artefacts catch and sustain my attention; a book and an A4 print of an obituary scanned from a newspaper.

This obituary refers to the death of Buddy J Finowicz, an American author of trash fiction who combined his fatalistic love of drink and drugs with a protestant work ethic. The paperback that self-consciously perches in the corner is a dog-eared edition of one of Finowicz? sci-fi tales. I scrutinise the quality of the A4 scan trying to discern the authenticity of this document; which could itself be part of a more elaborate fiction.

The second room of the gallery is a decrepit relic of past industrial use. Damp brick and worn wood; it is a context that would impose its presence over any artwork. However, the reoccurring traces of Finowicz begin to engulf this interior within the character's encroaching narrative. In fact, there are two characters presented here; the Author (a lesser known Bukowski or Hunter S Thompson) and the Fanatic Reader (who has been trawling the internet for information on Finowicz whilst building his collection of second hand paperbacks). This subtle but intriguing work - consisting of print-outs from the net complete with URLs, a Venn diagram, and a scattering of discarded books - seems so omnipotent that it is in danger of subsuming the rest of the exhibition in its seductive mythology.

Maria Theodoraki's Stand-ins is a museological cabinet containing six pairs of photographs. Each pair shows aspects of a Greek caryatid (a sculpted female figure serving as a pillar); one photograph always shows the figure in its original site of the Erechtheion, whilst the other displays it in a museum context. This work coherently addresses ideas of the original and the copy, or "stand-ins, props, fakes and replicas", as set out in the press release. Theodoraki's work also confronts the political issues bound up in the acquisition and display of cultural artefacts, although it does this in a literal way.

Sion Parkinson's installation of scaffolding, tarpaulin and snakeskin is unnerving in its formal sensitivity to materials; establishing the possibility for narrative encounters. After discovering the shed reptilian skin draped between layers of translucent plastic, a beige leather belt hung on a metal hand rail adopts an animate and sinister presence. Richard Whitby's video projection has a soundtrack that echoes through the space, also serving to cast an apocalyptic, perhaps melodramatic, atmosphere. His piece Terminator brings together a smartly dressed character (who we may assume to be a city worker), an animatronic arm, whose synthetic flesh is persistently hacked away, and a male voice disclosing links between economic recession, political power and conspiracy.

Alongside the exhibition, two complimentary press releases contain texts by Whitby on Dubailand; a site of ambitious, neo-liberal, cultural importation left to decay in the nascent stages of its construction due to economic recession and perhaps its own hubris. These intriguing texts use Dubailand as a synecdochical location that in some ways contextualises the American Mountain project. The accompanying website¹ also contains supplementary material that enriches the scope of this exhibition. For example; Jamie George's transcript of his presentation on supermarkets is an interesting reflection on the "industrial shed(s)" that litter our everyday lives.

'American Mountains' is a fragmented constellation of diverse practices that share similar approaches. The complex issues that it grapples with; notions of otherness and familiarity; the creation and decay of reality; and the commoditisation of culture, history and experience; are proximate concerns that are dealt with in a way that attempts to negotiate the (potentially hermetic) realm of art whilst linking out to a world beyond. My main criticism could be seen as either a success or failure of the exhibition; that the ambiguous analogies and frameworks that exist within or contextualise the project (Finowicz, Dubailand, Terminator's conspiracy theory) battle against each other to consume the exhibition as symptoms of their own internal logic. 'American Mountains' contains content for several projects and consequently the exhibition may suffer from the vivacity of the ideas it tries to contain.

¹ www.dreck.co.uk/americanmountains

Venue detail:
Auto-Italia South East »
1 Glengall Road, LONDON SE15 6NJ

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