INTERFACE

REVIEW

One Thing Against Another

Aspex, Portsmouth
2 August - 21 September 2008

Reviewed by: Laura Ball

 

Sam Basu, James Ireland, David Kefford, Eduardo Padilha and Alice Walton are the exhibiting artists collaborating to create One Thing Against Another, held at Aspex, Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth. The exhibition incorporates contemporary sculpture that works in unison with the rustic Vulcan Building. Works playfully rub up against their immediate physical environment for support and have a slapstick, haphazard feel. Artists use short-lived, everyday materials to create the work in situ using unusual ways of display. Therefore, it offers an alternative method of curating contemporary sculpture as traditional plinths are not used. The rather apt title describes the work perfectly, as often household objects are literally leaned against another to create a overall engrossing composition of gadgets. 

Sam Basu is an obsessive inventor of dream like worlds that explore the sub-conscious. He often exhibits impossible landscapes and models of wildlife with a primitive, primordial impression. In One Thing Against Another he has created several child like paintings which hang unpredictably on a line of wire high above the viewer, simply fastened on using wooden pegs. The images are of experimental patterns using cubes, diamonds, honeycomb shapes and maze like lines on transparent cellophane and paper. Basu's string piece additionally divides up the exhibition space, by wrapping numerous lines of string around the central pillars creating a spider web effect. The crisscrossed string urges the visitor to walk around the room in a circle anti-clockwise from the entrance. Light through the large warehouse windows create webbed shadows like a sundial throughout the day.

James Ireland transforms commonplace industrial objects and synthetics into installations that allude to romantic landscapes. His sculptures add poetic significance to the objects and use minimal aesthetics. Here a suspended and leaning sculpture uses two metal ovals fixed together with one bolt and precariously holding a individual branch. This makes anyone standing near it very uneasy about it's secureness, and in light of recent news regarding a visitor of The Royal Academy summer show knocking over a £6000 piece of work curated by Tracy Emin, one feels extremely apprehensive standing next to these unstable sculptures. 

In contrast to these minimal sculptures your eye is immediately drawn to a David Kefford sculpture called Restricted Growth. Comprising of sticks, rope, a discarded bicycle basket, a plant and two red balls hanging in a jettisoned net bag. These objects are reconfigured and put together using low tech DIY processes to form a new object. In this case there is a sense of voyeuristic uncertainty as the composition seems to depict male genitalia. It is particularly vulgar, yet fascinating how the objects are all put together. Kefford's sculptures often imbue human emotions, with this exhibition there is without a doubt a sense of embarrassment and disorientation.

Also creating a sense of unease and embarrassment is Alice Walton's untitled installation consisting of a walk in cube filled with smaller cubes of corrugated cardboard. Creating windows of patterned card. The precision in creating this work must have been enormous. However, when standing inside the installation there is a sense that it is somehow unfinished. Nude photos ripped from books and magazines are hung on the bare cardboard sections, but the bodies are covered acrimoniously in various colored tape. Why? It is unclear, yet you get a feeling that there is an unconscious motive for this quite perverted way of working using child like objects, and methods of experimentation.

Throughout the exhibition you notice more and more work that is hidden in the environment. For example: there are more David Kefford sculptures fastened in nooks and crannies of the buildings pillars. Eduardo Padilha's work likewise appears as if from no where while you stroll around the rectangular room. Sprayed directly onto the wall using glossed white, a pattern of diamonds folds around the corner of the room. You only notice the piece when the light shines correctly on the gloss making it cleverly reflect into your line of sight. Padilha uses found objects to create layers and inverted images which creates a sense of disarray. 

Overall, the atmosphere of this curious exhibition is one of unpredictability. Several works look very wobbly, and I am sure if Freud were alive to witness it he would have a field day! The work involves child like experimentation and often juvenile objects that create new objects with very obscene undertones. The title hints to carrying out a sexual act, and work such as Kefford's Restricted Growth conjure up explicit images. Could it refer to the artists own childhood and unconscious thoughts? Or does it depend on how and by whom the work is interpreted? I certainly left the exhibition feeling marginally red-faced. One Thing Against Another is indeed a fun exhibition that teases the viewers perceptions on household objects. It should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, and it pushes the boundaries of sculptural display seeming very risky in more ways than one.

 

The exhibition is also accompanied by four offsite sculptures by artists that play with their outdoor environments using found objects, and is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation. Offsite locations include Victoria Park Aviary, The Norrish Central Library, The Kings Theatre and The Butterfly House, Portsmouth. 

 

Writer detail:
I am a studying artist currently living in Portsmouth, UK. My work uses a variety of media including photography and found objects, with the aim of combining both the romanticism and treacheries inherent in our unique UK coastline. I create dynamic, unique pieces of installation work in and around the area of the British Seaside.

laura@lauraball.co.uk |

Venue detail:
Aspex
The Vulcan Building Gunwharf Quays Portsmouth Hampshire

www.aspex.org.uk/exhibitions/future.htm

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