I'll be honest. Gallery 9 didn't really appeal to me as much as some of the others. Clunie Reid's photographic collages with additional graffiti left me completely unmoved. Peter Peri's geometric forms on black backgrounds were rather better with Infanta being my favourite of the collection. I liked them well enough but not as much as I'd liked other things in the gallery. Fergal Stapleton's two black boxes also did very little for me. Black perspex boxes on black stands with red lights inside.
"It's a red light in a box." commented my friend. I consulted the guide book.
"Or to put it another way," I said, "It's 'bound by a concern with elucidating the various stages of the fictive, the apparent and the real...holding in equilibrium the fantastical with the blunt actualities of junk, exemplifying this in their reordering of things known, producing new and surprising value out of meagre means'".
It was however, in spite of all that, a red light in a box.
We moved on to gallery ten, a decidedly odd and rather unsettling affair in which one corner had been filled with a mountain of old hi-fi speakers and powered with a vacuum cleaner and a player piano. The sounds it produced were quite eerie and the sensation of walking around and through the sculpture, becoming, in essence, part of the sculpture was odd. I didn't really understand the point though. As you may guess the guide book left me no wiser as to the intent of the piece.
Two artists were represented in gallery eleven - Ryan Moseley whose paintings had a cartoon grotesqueness to them that reminded me vaguely of something I've seen before though I've still been unable to work out quite what. They all seemed to included severed or separated limbs in a bizarre and disturbing carnival setting. Jonathon Baldock's strangely decorated and mistaken busts were also unsettling and the realisation that they were constructed - unconventionally - of dough did little to alleviate the disorientation of the forms.
And finally, as we entered gallery twelve we came to a familiar piece of art. Anyone who watched School of Saatchi will have seen Eugenie Scrase's winning piece which was a piece of fallen tree impaled on a fence. I discussed it at the time and you can go look up what I said back then. For now suffice it to say that having seen it in real life rather than on TV my opinion remains unchanged.
Donald Urqhart's drawings were rather more conventional, being a series of sketches of and about famous blondes - Dusty Springfield, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors and so on. They were well done but overshadowed by the strange spectacle in the corner where an art group, littlewhitehead presented a very disturbing piece in which a group of figures, very realistic figures, were huddled looking at something in the corner. It's strange sense of suppressed violence and aggression made approaching it an uncomfortable experience.
Lynette Yiadom Boakye's paintings were also uncomfortable viewings as their grotesque cast of would-be celebrities were nightmarishly portrayed with a distinctly zombiefied look.
Which brings us at last to gallery thirteen.
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