INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
No Man's Land
The Lowry, Salford Quays and Static, Liverpool 26 January – 28 April
Reviewed by: Simon Webb
Walking through the large elongated space of the Lowry where David Walker's sizeable photographs are installed is a lonely experience. As one close-up of detritus follows another, we are presented with the bleak details of abandoned rubbish, toys and bottles of urine that have been cast aside on the roadside.
The images 'celebrate' the busy, but long superseded highway of the A580, the east Lancashire road that first connected Liverpool and Manchester in 1934. They are engagingly mundane images, incredibly detailed and beautifully lit with a pathos that parallels the road's waning significance.
As well as being melancholy, some of these fragments of people's lives are also bizarre and funny, like the page from a 1950s nature magazine, or the vicar's calling card left amongst daffodils, however all invite interpretation from the viewer to complete the story.
Each is anchored by text and poetry from Jean Sprackland and Stephen Walling, that guides the viewer suggesting, but never prescribing, a version of the possibilities inherent in the photographs. Yet while some of these vignettes can be stunningly beautiful, others over-egg the image. A chance shadow on a piece of litter suggesting the profile of a woman singing into a microphone is accompanied by a text with references to jazz singers, and visceral images of road kill have "The motto 'round here's keep moving" as an opening line.
At the other end of the A580 in Liverpool, Static shows the images as a looped video projection onto the concrete floor accompanied by the drone of passing traffic. Their part of the bargain seems primarily to echo the sense of connection between the two cities made physical by the road from which the show takes its conceptual foundations. While it makes literal reference to the fleeting moments trapped by the camera and creates an enjoyably intoxicating and hallucinogenic effect, the work here seems separate from the photographs, like a different form of display for its own sake rather than adding to the premise of the exhibition.
Writer detail:
SIMON WEBB
is an artist and writer based in Birmingham.
Venue detail:
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