Exhibitions Andrew Bracey has visited

24th February, John Piper, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

24th February, Richard Long, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

21st February, Karl Fritsch, Manchester Art Gallery

15th February, Co-Respondent, Transition Gallery, London

15th February, Susan Hiller - Channels, Matts Gallery, London

15th February, Mike Nelson - To The Memory of Honore de Balzac, Matt Gallery, London

15th February, Eva Hesse - 1965, Hauser and Wirth, London

15th February, Bruce Nauman - Mindfuck, Hauser and Wirth, London

15th February, Yelena Popova, Cole, London

15th February, Grit to Gold: Collaging the Abstract, Standpoint Gallery, London

15th February, Kate MccGwire, All Visual Arts, London

12th February, The World is Almost 6000 Years Old, The Collection, Lincoln

1st February, Versus, Rogue Project Space, Manchester

4th Feb 2013

1st February 2013 - Manchester

Versus - Rogue Project Space I must admit a self interest in this exhibition, not only do I spend my time almost equally between the two cities involved (working 3 days in Lincoln as a lecturer and the rest of the time being an artist in Manchester). Perhaps because of my straddling role I was invited to set a brief for the 2 warring tribes of artists from each city to respond to. The format follows, but expands upon the first Versus show at The Collection last year where the 3 artists from Lincoln competed with each other with a brief set by the esteemed Steve Dutton, via the equally esteemed John Roberts. In true X-factor generation fashion a winner was decided by audience vote. In the latest incarnation of the format the audience at Rogue voted for the city rather than the individual artists

To stoke the fires I set a brief based on the dialogue form the infamous meat packing scene form Rocky and the artists generally responded verve and competitiveness. Eye of the tiger baby. On the Lincoln side Nick Simpson invited audience participation in the form of a skipping contest, the slap of the rope on board amplified through the space, along with the taunts and encouragement of the crowd. I scored a mightily underwhelming low of the night in 15 skips in 30 seconds, whilst the artist conquered with an incredible (the possibility of cheating being involved was discussed) 74 skips in the same time. On the Manchester side Annie Carpenter invited partners from the crowd to compete in a dance off with her to Eye of the Tiger on the Wii. I lost emphatically again, shades of the ‘it is the competing that matters’ attitude from school returned to me. I am not a competitive person.

However the atmosphere of congenial competitiveness underlay the whole evening. Lincoln sent people into space, via Rob Britt’s Heath Robinson space capsule, Manchester responded with Magnus Quaife’s WWF disguised as porn video clips. Lincoln taunted with Ian Manicom’s all seeing Rocky eye (a camera inserted into the eyes of a Stallone mask), whilst Manchester almost stole the thunder with Nicola Smith’s spellbinding giant balloon performance. In the end Lincoln appeared to win, somewhat strangely a win for the away side. There are plans to take the format on to other pastures, which I encourage. A note of caution though, every format has a shelf life before it gets tired. Does one really need Masterchef South Africa for instance? So for now Versus is a breath of fresh air, just keep the air fresh.

21st Dec 2012

Top Ten Favourite shows of 2012

Here are my 10 favourite contemporary art exhibitions of the year. My thoughts of the time can be read if you click on the show’s title.

1 Rhys Chatham - Liverpool Anglican Cathedral Ok so not technically an exhibition, but rarely have I been as affected by anything, ever, ever. I could very happily have spent the rest of 2012 listening to this. In fact I have spent many occasions walking around with the sound of 100 guitars running through my head. It made me realise how rarely I get a tingle of excitement in a gallery, this had that in droves. (scroll to bottom)

2 Painting Show - Eastside Projects I thought this would be the best show I saw all year in January and indeed it was.

3 Indiscipline of Painting - Mead Gallery Intelligent show of painting, which has long remained in my head.

4 Jeremy Deller - Hayward Gallery Gosh he is good isn’t he. The sort of artist you want these times to be remembered for.

5 Charlene Von Heyl - Tate Liverpool Just the sort of painter I am jealous of as a painter, such an enjoyable exhibition of painting.

6 David Claerbout - Parasol Unit Quality work, Quality Gallery, Quality exhibition. (scroll to near bottom)

7 Mark Leckey - Manchester Art Gallery Just the sort of show I want to see more of at Manchester Art Gallery.

8 Aligihero Boetti - Tate Modern Just the sort of show I want to see more of at Tate Modern. (scroll to middle)

9 Ha Ha What Does This Represent - Standpoint Gallery Clearly there were a lot of good painting shows I went to this year, Roll on 2013. (scroll to middle)

10 Jennifer West - S1 Artspace Immersive and infinitely captivating. (scroll to bottom)

11. Compass - Lincolnshire So as my number 1 was not an exhibition I can slip in this rather fine exhibition into a cop-out top 11.

21st Dec 2012

22nd December 2012 - Manchester

Zombie Modernism – Malgras/Naudet The sort of show artist run space were designed to put on and more the shame that you normally see shows like this in space like Malgra/Naudet as opposed to public galleries. This felt a little like the curatorial equivalent of the cinema auteur director. Good art brought together with a particular vision or position, but one that is also open ended and great than the sum of the parts. Or something like that. Zombies are undead parasitic, flesh eaters, something that is in principle something horrific, but in my mind also something put through the grinder of low budget horror movies, with hyper-red blood. And hyper colour is what it would appear Zombie Modernist artists feed off, if the evidence of this show is anything to go by.

Before I visited the show I had 2 pre-emptive things in mind, one was the iconic Zombie Golf show by Bank, the other was that this must be a show laden in irony and parody. A strength of the show is that it felt sincere, not mocking, quality rang through, even though some of the art use some low budget materials, like the horror movies though, it is what you do with it that matters. Noel Clueit’s huge expansive new work dominates the show initially. On the far wall a red and orange meandering line describes a form. On closer inspection this has been composed on numerous copies of a 12 inch record sleeve, each one painted slightly differently and assembled to give the piece its dynamic form.

Opposite Stuart Edmundson competes with the aptly titled BoooooM. A rather fine, unpainted free standing wall holds a black and white photograph, which is upside down and a canvas painting of a sculpture, painted in a rather odd semi-gestural way. In front a stack of colour box-like forms stand on some silver bubble wrap and a deconstructed mirror peeps round the top. Edmundson seems a key artist in this show, someone who is exploring modernism paradigms in a manner that could only be explored by someone active today. He appears to be an artist that simultaneously critiques, applauds, challenges and questions modernism and formalism.

Sharon Hall sits a little adrift from the other artists in the show as she is positioned in a direct continuation of modernism in many ways. However the more time I spent in the space the more her work both fitted and more significantly held the other work in the show. Not Titled (Orange Fan) in particular sang and fitted with so many others in the space. This conversation seemed to be to most direct in relation to 2 works diagonally opposite form it. On the left was Rhys Coren’s Biancazzrri, an abstract harlequin screen-saver-like animation, apparently derived from the Lazio goalkeeper’s top in the early nineties. To the other end of the wall hung Cathy Wade’s Summer Wind; another record sleeve, but with a very different attitude to Clueit’s. Wade has painted vibrant pink geometric patterns in response to the lounging woman on it. It sat atop an elegant shelf, half hard-wood, half luxurious painted red.

Many of the other works in the show created similar dialogues with each other, and in turn with modernism. I wonder if the zombie positioning is a misnomer. It makes a catchy title, but the artists in the show seem too sincere about what they are doing to be the walking art-dead, Or perhaps I have got this wrong, maybe it is not the artists that are zombies, feeding off modernism, but modernism itself that is the zombie, something that just wont die, like in so many of those horror flicks.

20th Dec 2012

21st December 2012 - Coventry

Adie Blundell – Herbert Museum and Gallery I went into this exhibition with no prior knowledge or expectation of the artist, beyond him being in the same studio building as someone I know. The work itself is good and intriguing, I liked it more than I expected. However I felt the display in the space did it a disservice, strangely the work should have fitted well into the institution, but did not as it was treated a little too much like art in places and like interpretative display in others. My biggest grip was with the labelling which had silhouetted pictures on them to help you identify each one and a large bold type telling you not to touch, despite the objects being several feet away beyond the museum issue ropes. These signs were clearly there as the last item in the clockwise sweep of the gallery encouraged you (in small, regular font) to open the drawers of a cabinet. Here you could views books of contextual interest and see some of Bundell’s drawings behind glass. In short the objects you were least likely to want to touch in the whole gallery.

Ok so gripe aside, the work stood up. The artist clearly has the mindset of the amateur chemist, archaeologist or inventor, a Heath Robinson type of figure. He also appears to revel in the alchemical, ordinary objects have been transformed and distressed and battered, extraordinary objects have been saved. The cabinet of curiosities exudes over all the work, in fact against the back wall the artist has assembled some of his own. Opposite sit a row of 9 proud vulture masks the artist has created, each has the feel of something from an early Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. My favourite piece featured a rather fine wooden ladder with a pair of feet halfway up, severed mysteriously from the absent body. Something apocalyptic appears to have happened to them as a weird calcification has infested each of them.

I have just finished reading Alasdair Gray’s book, Poor Thing. This is a re-imaging of the Victorian novel, in line with Frankenstein or Dr. Jeckel and Mr Hyde, with plenty of post-modern flourishes. In the book a Dr. has apparently brought a suicide corpse back to life with the brain of the unborn foetus in the pregnant woman. I could not help but consider the work of Blundell in a similar light, the pieces are all bastardised, cobbled together forms, but each seems to make sense and give the air of something that fits in the world or perhaps did once upon a time.

Floor Plan for an Institution – Meter Room I had not visited Meter Room before, but have followed their projects via social media and their website, as I believe this is a good model for an ambitious artist run space and is also in Coventry, a place I am somewhat intrigued by. I grew up in a picture-postcard, rural village in Devon and I think Coventry is pretty much the flipside of the coin, an industrial heart ravaged by the effects of the war. The difference is palpable, but I digress. The current exhibition at Meter Room is a re-examination or a critique of an institution. It seeks to transpose the logistics, or rather the spaces or zones, consistent with a 21^st Century arts institution onto a rather typical (if such a thing exists) artist run space. In turn each of the zones have been given to an artist run space to respond to, which are being drip-fed into Meter Room over a period of 5 months. The identified zones are The Reception, The Auditorium, The Café and Bookshop, The Archive and The Gallery. I saw 2 ½ of these on my mid term visit.

The Reception had been given to Division of Labour, a new artist run space in Malvern and Worcester (where my Nan lived, but again I digress). A typical reception desk had been transposed to the space, where for the month of October a bored, inattentive receptionist had been employed to play solitaire and ignore visitors. This should be a site familiar to any London gallery, and in fact anyone who visited Cornerhouse at the start of the millennium, when I was on reception duties (though I rarely played solitaire in my defence).

The standout insertion here though was an updating of Spanish artist’s Antoni Muntadas’ 1987 piece, Backroom. A CCTV monitor sat above the reception desk watching, or rather allowing us to watch, the office of the gallery. The piece was originally shown at Luisa Strina gallery, the oldest commercial gallery in Sau Paulo, which I imagine presented a rather different office space than that of Meter Room, which is more of Grandad’s shed of interesting things than clinical office. The updating was perfect in its absurdity, the office at Meter Room is also clearly visible to the viewer through 5 office windows, in fact far more clearly than the camera eye can see. The context of CCTV has shifted substantially in the 25 years since the piece was first realised. In England we reportedly have more CCTV cameras per capita than any other country, yet apparently the ones in Downing Street are unreliable in ascertaining how many police and members of the public are in-shot when a cabinet minister allegedly calls officers plebs!

The Audiotorium had been given over to Vinyl Art Space, based in Birmingham, who designated the existing gallery space as an auditorium to hear the experience of several emerging and recent graduates who made work in the space. The work they produced was all made in response to what others had made and the results were strewn around the gallery somewhat chaotically.

The half part of what I experienced was the café and bookshop, which has been given to Movement gallery, again based in Worcester. I saw the emergence of their contribution, which at present consists of a tea trolley (apparently one used in an episode of Top Gear, fact fans). This will be adapted ready for a launch in the new-year. I should mention that Movement is based in a railway station and the tea trolley seemed to be straight out of British Rail era, i.e pre muffins and flapjack choice overload of today’s trolleys.

The show is building over the run of the show, remnants from the previous shows can be moved, edited or changed by the next inhabitants. This reminded me a little of LOT, an artist run space in Bristol which ran for one year. Each show had a different take and feel, but was also augmented by improvements, such as new lighting or a ripping up of the rather foul carpet. Meter Room as an institution appears to have an ethos of this, but in the incorporation of works from previous shows into the structure of the building, and I guess into each subsequent show. So a permanent collection is growing with works by Lawrence Weiner and Louise Lawler sitting happily or uncomfortably with each show.

20th Dec 2012

21st December 2012 - Birmingham

Beat Streuli – Ikon Gallery I have never written a response to an exhibition whilst still in the gallery and I know feel rather awkward as I am not sure it is an exhibition I am particularly positive about. The work of Beat Streuli was beautifully installed in what is pretty much my favourite gallery in the UK. However, for me, the work did not stand up to it, I found the content rather vacuous, spectacle of nothingness (or actually not even that as just writing that makes it sound too interesting!) Both gallery spaces in Ikon are covered in images of people going about their everyday activities. Steuli keeps his camera aloof from this ‘action’ and uses the telephoto lens to record what, he says in the exhibition’s guide, “is happening around me almost in an automatic way”.

He goes on to talk of a kinship with the great Cartier-Bresson, specifically “because he was very much about plain observation and narration about given situations and given places and people”. Tellingly though Streuli earlier distances himself from the iconic photographer by saying his photographs are certainly not about Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moments’. For me this is what makes Cartier-Bresson’s work so stimulating, and the lack of it is perhaps what is truly lacking in Streuli’s work. This might be a little unfair on Streuli and more a reflection on what initially separated and distinguished him when he emerged in the 90’s is now what makes him indistinguishable from so many imitators (artists, photographers, CCTV operatives or in fact anyone in this digital age), whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Gallery one’s walls are filled with billboard sized photographs of people as they inhabit a street, most of which are shunted directly up against each other. Each person’s eye is averted away from the camera’s (and photographer’s) gaze, in what almost feels in some cases to be a repelled action, as opposed to being (what is probably the case) a result of the artist’s selection. Despite the spectacle of the presentation, none of the images grabbed me and I could not help but compare my experience of walking to the gallery. I stopped to eat a frankfurter from the Christmas market and started to people watch as you tend to do in these sort of circumstances. I am not sure if Streuli’s work here adds anything to this process, the transformation of this action (at a distance) into art does nothing for me. I did not have any of the questions and thoughts that I conjured whilst out on the streets.

Upstairs in the second gallery Streuli turns to moving image, with magnificently installed floating walls as projection screens sitting at jaunty angles in the gallery, or precisely placed flat screen and box monitors. The content is the same as downstairs, this time of people from Birmingham. The difference is that the time we have to look at each image is dictated by the artist; in orchestrated slideshows of the images. As I watched I could not help feeling that there is something paradoxical at play here. They images are simply too involved with the aesthetic to hold with the positioning of them being ‘concerned with ordinariness, undramatic moments and the mundane’ as the gallery guide informs us. If this were the case then they are not truly reflecting this as there is something very composed about each of them. However they are also not aesthetic enough to stand up as interesting images for me.

There is not enough in the act of what the artist is doing to separate his images from what is already in the everyday. In this case the everyday is actually probably more interesting than that which the gallery is presenting back to us within the white walls. I will now drain my cappuccino and head back out onto the streets.

17th Dec 2012

14th December 2012 - Manchester

Tattoo City - Castlefield Gallery This group exhibition was curated by artist Samson Kambalu and Clarissa Corfe from Castlefield gallery, though it is equally being presented as a solo show (with additional artists) and an extension of Kambula’s third novel of the same title. I think the analogy with a novel is an apt one, I felt that this was a very dense exhibition (like a complex novel); in the selection of artworks, in the links and connections between them and in the invitation to enter into the head space of Kambula. I think that the only true way to understand the exhibition is to become Kambula or at least to understand his background (born in Malawi with a big dollop of Nietzsche read to him by his father, through to his invented religion, Holballism). This is something possibly achieved by reading his 2 previous novels, or by being knowledgeable about the various contextual threads underpinning the show (African and Protestant heritage, Steiner schools, ritual culture and so on). As I was not willing or able to do this I did not feel I could not come close to properly understanding the show. I guess I did the equivalent of skim reading the exhibition. I can tell it is a complex, personal exhibition and it is ambitious in its scope. It also requires a huge investment from the audience to even scratch the surface. If this show is a novel it is no ‘holiday-by-the-pool’ effort.

So as I had not read Kamblau’s novels, in order to understand his curation of an exhibition, I instead focused on the artworks. There were many (32) to look at, including several from Kambula including his writing desk, with a rather staged scattering of his reference books. Downstairs a more successful piece, ‘Forty Rants’ payed inside a mini cinema constructed by Nicholas Pople. My favorite work by Kambula though was perhaps his most subtle and most present. Spreading through the whole gallery was a trancelike meditative chanting. This was Joseph Beuy’s ‘Ja, Ja, Ja, Ne, Nee, Nee’, or rather it was Kambula re-staging Beuys, the sound emanating from within the plinth which held a stack of felt, which originally held the reel to reel tape of Beuys’ original work. For me this work somehow resolved many of the tensions within the show and explained a lot, of how the contemporary artist inhabits the ‘other’, in this case the iconic artist shaman.

Two works sat next to each other on plinths, each simple on the first look, and somewhat mind-boggling when one considers the labour required to realise each. In a glass vessel sat 6,128,374 grains of sand. We know this because it is the title of Jochem Hendricks’ contribution to the show. He knows it because he paid assistants (often illegal immigrants in a nod to Santiago Sierra’s practice) to count each grain of sand. Next to it is a simple bowl made of bees-wax, an artwork by Sam Mukumba called ‘Essence of time’. Again a simple form, and again one can only imagine the labour of all the bees to produce the raw material of the object. I have no idea how these two works fitted in with Kambula’s curatorial thinking, I am certain it does, but for me they were both strong works and made by 2 artists I had not encountered before.

Kevin Hunt is an artist whose work I know well and he had several pieces scattered around the gallery space, created a dialogue with other artist’s work. Sigrid Holmwood is another artist whose work I like. Upstairs is a painting of a forest scene, with scattered debris in the foreground all painted in her signature palette. Downstairs there are several collected objects from a research visit to California around the underground movement, The San Francisco Diggers. For me it is the alchemical effect of painting that is revealed in the comparison of Holmwood’s 2 pieces in the show. The objects require the knowledge of their origins in order to lift their interest from the humble and banal, the paintings hold this interest anyway and build on it with extended contemplation.

I suppose these thoughts about Holmwood’s practice are evocative of the whole show, I am certain that the more you invest into the exhibition the more you will get out of it. I know I did not get enough out of it, but this is my fault as opposed to the exhibition. The quality is all there, though for me the exhibition was too dense in its requirement to have so much contextual knowledge around the shows central themes. I fell back on looking at some good pieces of art, which is ultimately what I took away from the show. Though I might just see how much Kambalu’s book is on amazon!

29th Nov 2012

29 November 2012 - Preston

Digital Aesthetic 3 – Harris Museum and Gallery The exhibition featured a range of artists whose work deal with the digital in diverse ways. There appeared to be a focus (by the curators) on pushing what could be termed as digital art, away from things purely created within the digital. This pulled the work beyond a focus on the capabilities of the digital, which often feature in festivals and exhibitions of this kind, something I feel reduces the experience to one of art of effects or exhibitions with a feel of a trade show. Thankfully I did not get this impression at The Harris, perhaps because the show did not solely look to the latest ‘thing’, but also back to work, such as Peter Callas’ Our Potential Allies which was first made in 1980 at the early days of what could be thought of as digital technology and thinking. Other works such as Terry Flaxton’s mesmerising long-zoom recreation of a Ansel Adams photograph looked back to the past and universal concerns and used the capabilities of the digital as a tool to achieve something extraordinary. In this case the zoom capabilities of a digital camera, which would not have been possible with analogue technology. This work was shown alongside Alfred William Hunt’s oil painting of a waterfall in Cumbria, creating a further link to the past depiction of the landscape, and a relationship between the similarities and differences between rural Britain and America.

Pat Flynn showed a host of seemingly banal images of empty frames, which became a complex space through their rendering and creation in the digital. This contrasted nicely (in the furthest walking possible point in the building from Flynn’s work) with Keith Brown’s visually complex hologram print, both of which I imagine would have taken a similar amount of time to produce, with completely different aesthetics. Yuan Goang-Ming meanwhile employs the digital to erase rather than build. Two versions of the same crossroads were hung beside one another as large photographs. On first impression they are reasonably banal, one is a shot of the junction in the day and one at night. Then the absence of cars and of people hit me. A bit like the opening of 28 Days Later. However these photographs have achieved a similar effect, not by literally clearing the streets as in Danny Boyle’s film, but by layering 70 scanned versions of the same medium format image over one another to order to erase activity. The impression of one moment in time is achieved through a layering of many different moments, to create something eerily rare or even impossible in modern, hectic life.

The show also featured heavyweight artists such as Sophie Calle, Lee Yongbaek, Peter Campus and a new commission form Harrison & Wood, whose work was as strong as ever and refreshing to see in this context; or rather in the context it was refreshing to see. Overall the exhibition’s major strength was by foregrounding good art and artists, that sometimes only edged into the digital focus of the title. All too often the art is forgotten in an exhibition of digital (art) and it was good to see this was certainly not the case here.

29th Nov 2012 | 1 note

22 November 2012 - Lincoln

A Focus For Memory - Usher Gallery There was a (I presume) deliberately sombre and contemplative tone to the dimmed galleries in the exhibition, which is essentially a Tim Davies exhibition, contextualised by the work of Michael Sanders and Paul Graham’s photographs. The idea of the memorial, and what it represents, how it is represented and how people engage with it is what drives the exhibition. The sound from Tim Davies’s effecting and affecting dual screen video installation is the immediate dominating experience. An almost stifling, abstract wall of sound constructed by the insertion (again I presume) of a microphone into the clothes of a military man as a troop march past a memorial conjures by an almost claustrophobic mix of heart beats, rustling fabric and heavy breathing. This disturbance was directly related to one of the screens for the piece - a large projected free standing wall, installed at a slant in the space - which featured a camera attached to the soldier as he marched which, creating a dizzying effect on viewing the work. The other screen had a more straight-forward wide shot of the marching troops.

Outside the exhibtion’s gallery, amongst the Usher Gallery’s collection of marble figures and paintings, a companion film by Davies played. This was very different in tone and visual feel, but there was a strong connection. Filmed with the lighting and feel of a Dutch still life, a wreath is carefully constructed by a person. Sombre and strangely moving, the piece is a good antidote to the confusion of the work the other side of the door. There is also a connection to Michael Sanders’ photograph (shown alongside a third piece by Davies), in that they are both potentials for memorials being realised. Sander’s has constructed a sand bag cenotaph-like form as a way of memorialising, but also critiscing the destruction of important sites of historical importance during the Iraq conflict, by both allied and Iraqi forces. Sanders’ documentation of his gesture is poignant, made more so by the artists sincerity of the gesture.

I have seen Paul Graham’s photographs of the streets of Northern Ireland’s cities before at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, which has a large collection of art made in response to that particular site of conflict. The idea of this collection is, in itself, a form of memorial, one that was wisely built up by the gallery at the time of the conflict and carried on afterwards. Graham’s images are on first site akin to a snapshot, yet the more time one spends with them, the more one pieces together, from the details, the clues that build up the picture of these sites of conflict.

This was a sensitive show, both in terms of its subject and the installation of the work in the space. It was excellent to see two contextual essays available to pick up and take away, allowing the visitor to allow the memory of the work, and what it represents, to extend beyond the gallery.

11th Nov 2012

Saturday 6th November - Lincoln

Crating – Mistaken Presence Crating is a curatorial experiment of an exhibition, which itself is housed within a gallery acting as a curatorial experiment over one year. Mistaken Presense is located in one of the earliest surviving Franciscan friary churches in Europe next to the library in Lincoln. It was empty for nearly 10 years after previously being the city’s museum before it moved to the Collection, before being taken over by curators Alan Armstrong and John Plowman. For the penultimate exhibition in the year long programme the gallery has been given over to a show curated by Fedja Klikovac. This exhibition looks back to an archive photograph of the building as it was used by when it was a museum, when a network of display cases housed the collection. Kikovac has responded by giving 6 artists the space of a packing crate to make a new piece of work in. These crates have been displayed deliberately in the beautiful historic space, which hint both at it’s museum past and of the transitional nature of both a temporary exhibition and the changing face and use of the building.

Each of the 6 artists have produced new work especially for the show and the space, with an equal variety of ideas and responses. Alison Wildinghas produced something far away from her usual fare. A fox sleeps tucked in the corner of the crate, whilst an odd, curious object is perched atop. I read this as a response to Francis Alys’ work for the National Gallery which shares its title with Wilding’s Nightwatch. However whilst in Alys’ work the fox scouted around the gallery being picked up on CCTV cameras, whilst in Wilding’s piece the fox is curled up and looks snug and content, we become the prowlers into its domain.

Nicholas Pope’s piece at the end is formally perhaps the most simple of the works with a series of amorphic shapes have been cut into the crate, which in turn has been covered in orange material from inside. A light inside creates a glow whilst it isperched at the back of the long, arched space. At the other end a canvas text piece by Braco Dimitrijevic is wedged into a sliver of room in the otherwise closed crate. There is an allusion to Kafka in the work, and perhaps the space is more than anything a Kafkaesque experience. Richard Wentworth has created a door way in his crate by screwing one side partway along the side of it, another front of another artist’s crate leans against it. Inside Wentworth crate a series of jars have been screwed to the roof, each containing a section of honeycomb, with honey oozing around it. The title ‘Them and Us’ alludes to a hierarchy, the display is both inviting and closed off, the effect is intriguing and puzzling. Like all of the works, no explanation is given as to the meaning of the works, something I am thankful for, though my grey cells are still working over what some of the pieces are.

Perhaps the oddest, and simultaneously, most straightforward of the works is Susan Hiller’s work, ‘Imp in the Box’. It is the most straightforward as the Imp is a symbol of Lincoln and as such is perhaps the most obvious thing that any of the artists have chosen to reflect upon. It is however a rather odd object and approach, vents have been placed into the side and a rather angry high-pitched imp-like struggle emanates from inside. One can only conclude that Hiller has snatched an imp and placed it inside the crate. The imp is not happy and is probably throwing curses at all that go near it. The feel of this work is closest to other works by Hiller, such as ‘PSI Girls’, ‘An Entertainment’ and ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’, as opposed to her more museum-like archival pieces that I, for one, would have expected from the show. This type of work is left to Rasa Todosijevic’s grid of messages in bottles.

The brilliance of this show is the strength and simplicity of the curatorial involvement, this in turn puts the focus onto the artists and the work, and their relationship to the space and its past. The placement in the space of the crates is particularly strong; a long line between the arches in the centre of the space, just enough off-kilter to keep interest in the viewer, which is heightened by the serpentine-like movement of the viewer around the crates and the space. The placement of the crates in this line means that the audience does a double take on each of the works, as they work their way back up from Nicholas Pope’s piece. I did not spend enough time in the space, as I was in a rush, but even given the 15 minutes or so that I was in space, I had more than enough thoughts to take away with me back to Manchester.

Exhibitions Andrew Bracey has visited

16th Feb 2013

Exhibitions visited in 2013

4th Feb 2013

1st February 2013 - Manchester

21st Dec 2012

Top Ten Favourite shows of 2012

21st Dec 2012

22nd December 2012 - Manchester

20th Dec 2012

21st December 2012 - Coventry

20th Dec 2012

21st December 2012 - Birmingham

17th Dec 2012

14th December 2012 - Manchester

29th Nov 2012

29 November 2012 - Preston

29th Nov 2012 | 1 note

22 November 2012 - Lincoln

11th Nov 2012

Saturday 6th November - Lincoln